Ray Acosta

...is scheduled as the guest speaker for the 341st meeting of the Karl Hess Club, to convene on May 15, 2023.

Ray Acosta on "The 1781 Battle of Cowpens."

Ray Acosta will discuss several topics centered around the Battle of Cowpens, beginning with American aircraft carriers in the Pacific theater of World War II. One carrier was named the USS Cowpens, after the Revolutionary War's Battle of Cowpens.

But mostly he'll analyze the battle itself, and how the overconfident British walked into a patriot trap, and got themselves enveloped and destroyed, forcing Britain's General Cornwallis to abandon South Carolina and move to Virginia. There he got trapped in Yorktown. His defeat ended the Revolutionary War.

He'll also profile the commander of the British forces at Cowpens, a fellow named Banastre Tarleton, a 26-year-old Lt. Colonel who had made a name for himself defeating patriot militias with his elite force, using "shock and awe" tactics." He'll conclude with a dicussion of movie portrayals of Tarleton, focusing mainly of Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, wherein Jason Isaacs played Tarleton.

About Ray Acosta

Ray Steve Acosta is an American of Mexican heritage, a telephone engineer, and a writer.

Born in San Diego (Feb 18, 1944) and raised in Los Angeles, Acosta graduated Downey High School in 1961. He earned an AA from Cerritos Junior College in 1963, and a BS in Mathematics at California State College, Los Angeles, in 1970. Between his college stays, he served two years in the U.S. Navy as an electronics technician.

Acosta began his career as an outside plant engineer for Pacific Telephone in Los Angeles. In 1979 he transferred to their HQ staff in San Francisco, where his engineering work focused on mechanized tools. In 1998 he moved to Dallas to work for GTE Internet Workings as a systems planner. He fully retired in 2001.

In 1991 Acosta became interested in Mexican history, especially its revolutionary era (1910 to 1920), reading over a dozen books on the subject. In 2002 he joined an online group of amateur historians interested in the revolution, where he attracted the attention of Richard Grabman of Editorial Mazatlán. Grabman asked Acosta to write a chronology of the revolution, which resulted in Acosta's first book, Revolutionary Days: A Chronology of the Mexican Revolution (2010).

Acosta currently lives in Whittier.