I have already mentioned the variety of names which are given to the events discussed here: ‘battle’ or ‘siege’ or ‘campaign’, ‘Yorktown’ or ‘Chesapeake’ or ‘Virginia Capes’, and possibly others. The variety is instructive, since the choice made by a particular historian will carry with it an implication as to the part of the events as a whole which is seen as the most important, and which the writer will therefore emphasise. If one uses, as many United States historians do, the term ‘siege of Yorktown’, then that implies that the really decisive event was the fairly brief fight in and around the town in October 1781, and it downgrades the importance – in some cases by ignoring it altogether – of the fighting at sea. Henry Johnston, for example, in his book on the campaign, dealt with the naval aspects in four pages. This is, it must be said, unlikely to be done nowadays, for there are plenty of accounts in which the two aspects are discussed, and naval historians provide good accounts of the fighting at sea, yet it remains likely that a much heavier emphasis will be placed on the land fighting if ‘siege’ and ‘Yorktown’ are in one's title, and so in one's consciousness.

Naval historians similarly tend to give too great an emphasis to the fighting at sea, and to regard the result of the land fighting as no more than an inevitable sequel to that at sea. In one notorious case Admiral Graves is said to have ‘lost no engagement, no ships… . He had merely lost America’, which ignores, in a quite ludicrous way, the rest of the war, land and sea, for eight years, from Bunker Hill to India. Such historians will also tend to downgrade the importance of the whole American theatre of the war, seeing the West Indies, the Indian Ocean, and, above all, the European theatre – the English Channel and Gibraltar – as the more important areas. Admiral Mahan, as an example, dismissed the actual fighting at Yorktown in a single sentence. So the old Shakespearean question about a name requires a different answer in this case than the one the poet suggested: the chosen name is not unimportant since it will denote the subject and will give an indication of the bias and the approach.