Results by Title
93 books about Revolution, 1775-1783
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1777: The Year of the Hangman
John S. Pancake
University of Alabama Press, 1977
Library of Congress E233.P27 | Dewey Decimal 973.333
A detailed study of the British invasion from Canada during the War of Independence
No one who has read the history of the War of Independence can fail to be fascinated by the campaign of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. The story evokes pictures in the mind's eye: scarlet-coated Englishmen; the green and blue uniforms of the German mercenaries; the flash of brass and silver and steel accoutrements; the swarms of Indians in their war paint; the whole moving through the green forests or sailing the blue waters of lakes and rivers. Even the names have a lyrical tone: Richelieu, Champlain, Oriskany, Ticonderoga, and La Chine.
Part of this fascination is the fact that the fate of the expedition marked a turning point in the history of the war. It is not surprising that there has been a host of chroniclers, scholars, and novelists, and those who fall in a category somewhere between because their artistry bridges the gaps that footnoted facts cannot, and so allows some scope for imagination (and may teach more history than the rest).
This fascination was partly responsible for Pancake’s exploration of this particular part of the history of the war. There was also the fact that no scholar since Hoffman Nickerson in his Turning Point of the Revolution (1926) has attempted a detailed study of the British invasion from Canada, although there has been a vast amount of literature on specific aspects of the campaign. No study to date has attempted to link the Canadian expedition to the concurrent operation of General Sir William Howe in Pennsylvania in such a way as to present a complete story of the campaign of 1777. From the point of its inception and launching by the American Secretary, Lord George Germain, to the point where it was reduced to a shambles at the end of the year.
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The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820
Robert A. Ferguson
Harvard University Press, 1997
Library of Congress PS193.F47 1997 | Dewey Decimal 810.9002
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The American Revolution and the Press: The Promise of Independence
Carol Sue Humphrey
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Library of Congress E209.H86 2013 | Dewey Decimal 071.309033
Finalist, 2014 AEJMC Tankard Book Award
Carol Sue Humphrey’s The American Revolution and the Pressargues that newspapers played an important role during America’s struggle for independence by keeping Americans engaged in the war even when the fighting occurred in distant locales. From the moment that the colonials received word of Britain’s new taxes in 1764 until reports of the peace treaty arrived in 1783, the press constituted the major source of information about events and developments in the conflict with the mother country. Both Benjamin Franklin, one of the Revolution’s greatest leaders, and Ambrose Serle, a Loyalist, described the press as an “engine” that should be used to advance the cause. The efforts of Patriot printers to keep readers informed about the war helped ensure ultimate success by boosting morale and rallying Americans to the cause until victory was achieved. As Humphrey illustrates, Revolutionary-era newspapers provided the political and ideological unity that helped Americans secure their independence and create a new nation.
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The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front
Gigantino, James J
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Library of Congress E263.N5A45 2015 | Dewey Decimal 974.903
Winner of the 2016 New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Authors Award for the Edited Works Category
Battles were fought in many colonies during the American Revolution, but New Jersey was home to more sustained and intense fighting over a longer period of time. The nine essays in The American Revolution in New Jersey, depict the many challenges New Jersey residents faced at the intersection of the front lines and the home front.
Unlike other colonies, New Jersey had significant economic power in part because of its location between the major ports of New York and Philadelphia. New people and new ideas arriving in the colony fostered tensions between Loyalists and Patriots that were at the core of the Revolution. Enlightenment thinking shaped the minds of New Jersey’s settlers as they began to question the meaning of freedom in the colony. Yeoman farmers demanded ownership of the land they worked on and members of the growing Quaker denomination decried the evils of slavery and spearheaded the abolitionist movement in the state. When larger portions of New Jersey were occupied by British forces early in the war, the unity of the state was crippled, pitting neighbor against neighbor for seven years.
The essays in this collection identify and explore the interconnections between the events on the battlefield and the daily lives of ordinary colonists during the Revolution. Using a wide historical lens, the contributors to The American Revolution in New Jersey capture the decades before and after the conflict as they interpret the causes of the war and the consequences of New Jersey’s reaction to the Revolution.
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America’s Forgotten Founders, second edition
Gary L. Gregg
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2012
Library of Congress E302.5.A46 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.30922
Beyond Washington and Jefferson: Ranking the Founders
Even as Americans devour books about our Founding Fathers, the focus seldom extends past a half dozen or so icons—Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. Many of the men (and women) who made prodigious contributions to the American founding have been all but forgotten.
America’s Forgotten Founders corrects this injustice. Editors Gary L. Gregg II and Mark David Hall surveyed forty-five top scholars in history, political science, and law to produce the first-ever ranking of the most neglected contributors to the American Revolution and our constitutional order. This unique book features engaging short biographies of the top ten most important Founders whose contributions are overlooked today: James Wilson, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, Roger Sherman, John Marshall, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and John Witherspoon.
The latest entry in ISI Books’ Lives of the Founders series, America’s Forgotten Founders reshapes our understanding of America’s founding generation.
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Among the Powers of the Earth
Eliga H. Gould
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress E249.G68 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.32
The Revolution’s aspiration was summed up by the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the American founding was also a bid for inclusion in the community of nations. According to Eliga Gould, America aspired to diplomatic recognition under international law and the authority to become an Atlantic colonizing power itself.
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Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America
Elisa Tamarkin
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Library of Congress E165.T17 2008 | Dewey Decimal 973.3
Anglophilia charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as Tamarkin shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics.
Tamarkin traces the wide-ranging effects of anglophilia on American literature, art and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the civil war. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Tamarkin highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, Anglophila argues that that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame-a release from the burdens of American culture-but an anachronistic structure of attachement in which U.S. Identity was lived in other languages of national expression.
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The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774-1781
Merrill Jensen
University of Wisconsin Press, 1959
Library of Congress KF4541.J4 1970 | Dewey Decimal 342.73
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The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774–1776
Mark R. Anderson
University Press of New England, 2013
Library of Congress E231.A64 2013 | Dewey Decimal 971.024
In this dramatic retelling of one of history’s great “what-ifs,” Mark R. Anderson examines the American colonies’ campaign to bring Quebec into the Continental confederation and free the Canadians from British “tyranny.” This significant reassessment of a little-studied campaign examines developments on both sides of the border that rapidly proceeded from peaceful diplomatic overtures to a sizable armed intervention. The military narrative encompasses Richard Montgomery’s plodding initial operations, Canadian partisan cooperation with officers like Ethan Allen, and the harrowing experiences of Benedict Arnold’s Kennebec expedition, as well as the sudden collapse of British defenses that secured the bulk of the province for the rebel cause. The book provides new insight into both Montgomery’s tragic Québec City defeat and a small but highly significant loyalist uprising in the rural northern parishes that was suppressed by Arnold and his Canadian patriot allies. Anderson closely examines the evolving relationships between occupiers and occupied, showing how rapidly changing circumstances variously fostered cooperation and encouraged resistance among different Canadian elements. The book homes in on the key political and military factors that ultimately doomed America’s first foreign war of liberation and resulted in the Continental Army’s decisive expulsion from Canada on the eve of the Declaration of Independence. The first full treatment of this fascinating chapter in Revolutionary War history in over a century, Anderson’s account is especially revealing in its presentation of contentious British rule in Quebec, and of Continental beliefs that Canadiens would greet the soldiers as liberators and allies in a common fight against the British yoke. This thoroughly researched and action-packed history will appeal to American and Canadian history buffs and military experts alike.
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Before the Volunteer State: New Thoughts on Early Tennessee, 1540–1800
Kristofer Ray
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Library of Congress F436.B44 2014 | Dewey Decimal 976.802
Most general studies of Tennessee history begin with the arrival of Anglo-American settlers in the 1760s, with only a brief overview of the state’s “prehistory.” This welcome volume rethinks this narrative by placing Tennessee’s origins firmly in the seventeenth century. In ten thoughtful essays, scholars of trans-Appalachian and early American history address a number of issues that have been touched on only fleetingly within Tennessee historiography, including the dynamic balance of Native American concerns and European imperial interests, the complexity of Revolutionary-era struggles, and the associated challenges of jurisdiction, dominion, and identity formation. Collectively, the volume situates Tennessee more firmly within the context of regional, North American, and Atlantic World developments.
The essays are divided into two parts—the first focusing on the establishment and geopolitical complexities of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century life in and around the Tennessee River, and the second exploring the effects of the American Revolution in this geopolitical space. Topics in Part One include Indian life in the late Mississippian era, how contact with Europeans forced a process of migration and change, European understanding of Cherokee strength, and the importance of the Creeks, Cherokees, and Shawnees to early Tennessee history. Part Two offers articles about the confusing milieu into which the region was thrown during the Revolution, the central role of kinship networks for both Indians and whites, and the difficulties of identity formation as Euro-Americans expanded their presence on the Tennessee frontier. The work concludes by addressing the issue of myth and memory and how early Tennessee history was overtaken by nineteenth-century historical narratives that continue to serve as the foundation for understanding the state.
Taken together, these essays provide a gateway through which to reimagine early Tennessee history—a reimagining that demonstrates the significance of the Volunteer State within broader trends in early modern, southern, trans-Appalachian, and Atlantic World history.
Kristofer Ray is senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly and an associate professor of early American history at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. He is the author of Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier.
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The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89
Edmund S. Morgan
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Library of Congress E208.M85 1992 | Dewey Decimal 973.3
In one remarkable quarter-century, thirteen quarrelsome colonies were transformed into a nation. Edmund S. Morgan's classic account of the Revolutionary period shows how the challenge of British taxation started the Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom and eventually led to the Revolution.
Morgan demonstrates that these principles were not abstract doctrines of political theory but grew instead out of the immediate needs and experiences of the colonists. They were held with passionate conviction, and incorporated, finally, into the constitutions of the new American states and of the United States.
Though the basic theme of the book and his assessment of what the Revolution achieved remain the same, Morgan has updated the revised edition of The Birth of the Republic (1977) to include some textual and stylistic changes as well as a substantial revision of the Bibliographic Note.
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The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89, Fourth Edition
Edmund S. Morgan
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Library of Congress E208.M85 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.3
In The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89, Edmund S. Morgan shows how the challenge of British taxation started Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom, and eventually led to the Revolution. By demonstrating that the founding fathers’ political philosophy was not grounded in theory, but rather grew out of their own immediate needs, Morgan paints a vivid portrait of how the founders’ own experiences shaped their passionate convictions, and these in turn were incorporated into the Constitution and other governmental documents. The Birth of the Republic is the classic account of the beginnings of the American government, and in this fourth edition the original text is supplemented with a new foreword by Joseph J. Ellis and a historiographic essay by Rosemarie Zagarri.
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Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence
Alan Gilbert
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Library of Congress E269.N3G55 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.3460896073
We commonly think of the American Revolution as simply the war for independence from British colonial rule. But, of course, that independence actually applied to only a portion of the American population—African Americans would still be bound in slavery for nearly another century. Alan Gilbert asks us to rethink what we know about the Revolutionary War, to realize that while white Americans were fighting for their freedom, many black Americans were joining the British imperial forces to gain theirs. Further, a movement led by sailors—both black and white—pushed strongly for emancipation on the American side. There were actually two wars being waged at once: a political revolution for independence from Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality.
Gilbert presents persuasive evidence that slavery could have been abolished during the Revolution itself if either side had fully pursued the military advantage of freeing slaves and pressing them into combat, and his extensive research also reveals that free blacks on both sides played a crucial and underappreciated role in the actual fighting. Black Patriots and Loyalists contends that the struggle for emancipation was not only basic to the Revolution itself, but was a rousing force that would inspire freedom movements like the abolition societies of the North and the black loyalist pilgrimages for freedom in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
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Boston and the Dawn of American Independence
Brian Deming
Westholme Publishing, 2013
Library of Congress F73.4.D46 2013 | Dewey Decimal 974.02
How a New England Port City Became the Site of the Revolution That Changed the History of the World
In 1760, no one could imagine the American colonies revolting against Great Britain. The colonists were not hungry peasants groaning under the whip of a brute. They lived well. Land was cheap, wages were good, opportunities abounded. While many colonists had been in the New World for generations, they identified with Britain, and England was still “home.” Yet in the space of just fifteen years these sturdy bonds snapped. Boston—a town of just 16,000—lit the fire for American Independence. Brian Deming explains how and why in his lucid, lively, and deeply researched Boston and the Dawn of American Independence.
To dodge British taxes, Boston merchants for as long as anyone could remember had routinely smuggled in molasses from French and Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. Boston distillers transformed this sweet cargo into rum, the liquid gold traded around the world. But British authorities cracked down on smuggling and imposed the Sugar Act to help pay for the debts incurred during their wars against France. Then came the hated Stamp Act, a tax on documents, newspapers, and printed materials of all kinds. In courtrooms, in the press, and in the streets, Bostonians rallied in protest against taxation without representation. As anger swept America, Boston was at the center of the storm, which burst forth with the infamous massacre and the Boston Tea Party. By 1775, open warfare erupted at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Boston and the Dawn of American Independence ties these scenes together with the people of the time, including John and Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere, as well as Thomas Hutchinson, the beleaguered Massachusetts royal governor, and James Otis, the bombastic, unstable early patriot. Readers hear their voices, but also those of many amazing, colorful, and memorable personalities— feisty mob leaders, defiant Tories, terrified townspeople. Deming illuminates this epic story with views of everyday life inside taverns, outside newspaper offices, and along the wharves, and the political dramas in London and Philadelphia that shaped the destiny of an empire and gave rise to the world’s first modern democracy.
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Boston’s Massacre
Eric Hinderaker
Harvard University Press, 2017
Library of Congress E215.4.H66 2017 | Dewey Decimal 973.3113
The event known as the Boston Massacre is among the most familiar in U.S. history, yet one of the least understood. Eric Hinderaker revisits this dramatic episode, examining the facts of that fateful night, the competing narratives that molded public perceptions, and the long campaign to transform the tragedy into a touchstone of American identity.
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British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution
Donald N. Hagist
Westholme Publishing, 2012
Library of Congress E267.H335 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.341
Nine Rare and Fascinating First-Person Profiles of Soldiers Who Fought for the British Crown
Much has been written about the colonists who took up arms during the American Revolution and the army they created. Far less literature, however, has been devoted to their adversaries. The professional soldiers that composed the British army are seldom considered on a personal level, instead being either overlooked or inaccurately characterized as conscripts and criminals. Most of the British Redcoats sent to America in defense of their government’s policies were career soldiers who enlisted voluntarily in their late teens or early twenties. They came from all walks of British life, including those with nowhere else to turn, those aspiring to improve their social standing, and all others in between. Statistics show that most were simply hardworking men with various amounts of education who had chosen the military in preference to other occupations. Very few of these soldiers left writings from which we can learn their private motives and experiences.
British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution is the first collection of personal narratives by British common soldiers ever assembled and published. Author Don N. Hagist has located first-hand accounts of nine soldiers who served in America in the 1770s and 1780s. In their own words we learn of the diverse population—among them a former weaver, a boy who quarelled with his family, and a man with wanderlust—who joined the army and served tirelessly and dutifully, sometimes faithfully and sometimes irresolutely, in the uniform of their nation. To accompany each narrative, the author provides a contextualizing essay based on archival research giving background on the soldier and his military service. Taken as a whole these true stories reveal much about the individuals who composed what was, at the time, the most formidable fighting force in the world.
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Cavalry of the American Revolution
Jim Piecuch
Westholme Publishing, 2012
Library of Congress E230.C39 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.33
Nine Historians and Writers Investigate the Role of Cavalry in the War for Independence
From the bitterly contested no-man’s-land between American and British lines in New York and New Jersey to the scorching pine forests of the South, the cavalry of both armies fought valiantly throughout the American Revolution. This volume explores several aspects of cavalry’s role in the war, which has often been overlooked in general histories. The topics covered include the development of the Continental Army’s cavalry arm, European influences on American cavalry training and tactics, accounts of several important cavalry raids and battles, and histories of mounted units such as the Continental Light Dragoons, American rangers in the South Carolina backcountry, and the British army’s Queen’s Rangers and “Black Dragoons,” the latter force composed entirely of former slaves. The essays also examine the roles of important commanders, including Brigadier General Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, Lieutenant Colonel William Washington, and Colonel Anthony Walton White of the American army, and British cavalry leaders Banastre “Bloody Ban” Tarleton and John Graves Simcoe, as well as the American prisoners of war who switched sides and served in the “British Legion.” The authors of the essays include acclaimed military historians Gregory J. W. Urwin and Lawrence E. Babits. Readers with a general interest in military history, as well as those with more specific interests in the American Revolution or the history of the cavalry arm, and anyone who wishes to undertake further study of these subjects, will find the essays fresh, engaging, and informative.
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Contents
Gregory J. W. Urwin: The Continental Light Dragoons, 1776-1783
Lee F. McGee: European Influences on Continental Cavalry
John M. Hutchins: Cavalry Action at Poundridge, New York
Donald J. Gara: Cavalry Battles in New York and New Jersey
Scott A. Miskimon: Anthony Walton White: A Revolutionary Dragoon
Michael C. Scoggins: South Carolina’s Backcountry Rangers
Lawrence E. Babits and Joshua B. Howard: Continentals in Tarleton’s
British Legion
Charles F. Price: Cavalry Operations at Eutaw Springs
Jim Piecuch: The “Black Dragoons”
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Charles Lee: Self Before Country
Mazzagetti, Dominick
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Library of Congress E207.L47M39 2013 | Dewey Decimal 355.0092
Received an Honorable Mention for the American Revolution Round Table of Richmond's 2014 Book Award
Dominick Mazzagetti presents an engaging account of the life of Charles Lee, the forgotten man of the American Revolution. History has not been kind to Lee—for good reason. In this compelling biography, Mazzagetti compares Lee’s life and attributes to those of George Washington and offers significant observations omitted from previous Lee biographies, including extensive correspondence with British officers in 1777 that reflects Lee’s abandonment of the Patriots’ cause.
Lee, a British officer, a veteran of the French and Indian War, and a critic of King George III, arrived in New York City in 1773 with an ego that knew no bounds and tolerated no rivals. A highly visible and newsworthy personality, he quickly took up the American cause and encouraged rebellion. As a result of this advocacy and his military skills, Lee was granted a commission as a major general in the Continental Army and soon became second-in-command to George Washington. He helped organize the defense of Boston, designed defenses for New York City, and commanded the force that repelled the British attack on Charleston.
Upon his return to New York in 1776, Lee was considered by some leaders of the Revolution to be an alternative to George Washington, who was in full retreat from British forces. Lee’s capture by the British in December 1776 put an end to that possibility. Lee’s subsequent release in a prisoner exchange in 1778 and return to an American command led to a dramatic confrontation with Washington on the battlefield at Monmouth, New Jersey, in June 1778. Washington chastised Lee publicly for ordering an unnecessary retreat. Lee suffered the ignominy of a court-martial conviction for this blunder and spent the remaining years to his death in 1782 attacking Washington. Although few doubted Lee’s loyalty at the time, his actions at Monmouth fueled speculation that he switched sides during his imprisonment.
A discovery years after his death completed Lee’s tale. In 1862, a researcher discovered “Mr. Lee’s Plan,” a detailed strategy for the defeat of the American rebels delivered to British General William Howe while Lee was held in captivity. This discovery sealed Lee’s historical record and ended all further discussion of his contributions to the American Revolution. Today, few people even realize that Fort Lee, on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, was named in his honor.
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Colonial New Hampshire: A History
Jere R. Daniell
University Press of New England, 2015
Library of Congress F37.D25 2015
In his full-scale history of New Hampshire from the Algonkin people to the coming of the American Revolution, the historian Jere R. Daniell discusses the Indian population, the development of community life, the founding of New Hampshire as a royal colony, the political adjustments that existence as a separate colony necessitated, the nature of New Hampshire’s social institutions, and many other subjects. His epilogue links colonial New Hampshire to subsequent developments in the state. This volume will interest historians of colonial New England and New Hampshire.
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Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act
Edited by Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Dartmouth College Press, 2016
Library of Congress E215.2.C66 2016 | Dewey Decimal 973.27
The first book-length study of the Stamp Act in decades, this timely collection draws together essays from a broad range of disciplines to provide a thoroughly original investigation of the influence of 1760s British tax legislation on colonial culture, and vice versa. While earlier scholarship has largely focused on the political origins and legacy of the Stamp Act, this volume illuminates the social and cultural impact of a legislative crisis that would end in revolution. Importantly, these essays question the traditional nationalist narrative of Stamp Act scholarship, offering a variety of counter identities and perspectives. Community without Consent recovers the stories of individuals often ignored or overlooked in existing scholarship, including women, Native Americans, and enslaved African Americans, by drawing on sources unavailable to or unexamined by earlier researchers. This urgent and original collection will appeal to the broadest of interdisciplinary audiences.
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The Conquest of The Illinois
George Rogers Clark. Foreword by Rand Burnette
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001
Library of Congress E234.C55 2001 | Dewey Decimal 973.334
Written only a decade after George Rogers Clark’s conquest of Illinois, this firsthand account shows the region as it existed in the 1770s, explains how British occupation affected Kentucky settlers, and exhibits Clark’s enormous diplomatic skills in convincing the French settlers and Indians along the rivers of Illinois that they were better off under the jurisdiction of the Americans rather than the British. In his new foreword to this book, Rand Burnette refers to Clark as a psychologist and an expert in human relations.
Believing the British responsible for Indian raids on the people of Kentucky, Clark determined to capture that area, which was claimed by his home state of Virginia. “His plan, which he presented to Governor Patrick Henry,” Burnette notes, “was to take possession of the Illinois country by defeating the British at Kaskaskia, win the support of the French in that area, and thus control both the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers. The British support of the Indians, who raided the Kentucky settlements from the Illinois country, would be at an end.”
Clark’s stirring narrative—written between 1789 and 1791 and covering 1773–1779—chronicles the events in the Old Northwest in the second half of the eighteenth century. Life on the frontier was dangerous and uncertain at this time. As Clark points out and Milo Milton Quaife underlines in his footnotes, death came to many at the hands of Indians or in military battles and skirmishes.
First published in 1920 and long out of print, the Quaife edition of Clark’s The Conquest of The Illinois reprinted here is for the modern reader superior to the original. First, Quaife provided an index. Equally important for modern readers, he standardized Clark’s spelling. (Clark had little formal education, and his spelling was even more eccentric than that found in a typical eighteenth-century account.) Finally, Quaife’s footnotes often include biographical sketches of the people in the book.
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The Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775–1783
Seanegan P. Sculley
Westholme Publishing, 2019
Library of Congress E208.S38 2019
Winner of the 2019 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award in Institutional History
How American Colonial Ideals Shaped Command, Discipline, and Honor in the U.S. Armed Forces
In the summer of 1775, a Virginia gentleman-planter was given command of a New England army laying siege to British-occupied Boston. With his appointment, the Continental Army was born. Yet the cultural differences between those serving in the army and their new commander-in-chief led to conflicts from the very beginning that threatened to end the Revolution before it could start. The key challenge for General George Washington was establishing the standards by which the soldiers would be led by their officers. What kind of man deserved to be an officer? Under what conditions would soldiers agree to serve? And how far could the army and its leaders go to discipline soldiers who violated those enlistment conditions? As historian Seanegan P. Sculley reveals in Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775–1783, these questions could not be determined by Washington alone. His junior officers and soldiers believed that they too had a part to play in determining how and to what degree their superior officers exercised military authority and how the army would operate during the war. A cultural negotiation concerning the use of and limits to military authority was worked out between the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army; although an unknown concept at the time, it is what we call leadership today. How this army was led and how the interactions between officers and soldiers from the various states of the new nation changed their understandings of the proper exercise of military authority was finally codified in General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s The Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, first published in 1779. The result was a form of military leadership that recognized the autonomy of the individual soldiers, a changing concept of honor, and a new American tradition of military service.
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Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy: A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution
John A. Nagy
Westholme Publishing, 2013
Library of Congress E280.C49N34 2013 | Dewey Decimal 973.386092
Newly Discovered Evidence Against a Man Who Has Long Been Suspected as Being a British Agent and America’s First Traitor
Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr. (1734–1778) was a respected medical man and civic leader in colonial Boston who was accused of being an agent for the British in the 1770s, providing compromising intelligence about the plans of the provincial leadership in Massachusetts as well as important information from the meetings of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Despite his eminence as a surgeon—he conducted an autopsy on one of the victims of the Boston Massacre—and his own correspondence and the numbers of references to him from contemporaries, no known image of him exists and many aspects of his life remain obscure. What we do know is that George Washington accused him of being a traitor to the colonial cause and had him arrested and tried; after first being jailed in Connecticut and then Massachusetts, during which he continued to profess his innocence, he was allowed to leave America on a British vessel in 1778, but it foundered in the Atlantic with all hands lost. The question of whether Dr. Benjamin Church was working for the British has never been conclusively demonstrated, and remains among the mysteries of the American Revolution.
In Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy: A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution, noted authority John A. Nagy has scoured original documents to establish the best case against Church, identifying previously unacknowledged correspondence and reports as containing references to the doctor and his activities, and noting an incriminating letter in the possession of the Library of Congress that is a coded communication composed by Church to his British contact. Nagy shows that at the cusp of the revolution, when the possibility—let alone the outcome—of an American colonial rebellion was far from assured, Church sought to align himself with the side he thought would emerge victorious—the British crown—and thus line his pockets with money that he desperately needed. A fascinating investigation into a centuries-old intrigue, this well-researched volume is an important contribution to American Revolution scholarship.
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Early American Almanac Humor
Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
Library of Congress PS533.E27 1987 | Dewey Decimal 817.208
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Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic
Jeremy Engels
Michigan State University Press, 2010
Library of Congress E302.1.E54 2010 | Dewey Decimal 973.31
The Declaration of Independence is usually celebrated as a radical document that inspired revolution in the English colonies, in France, and elsewhere. In Enemyship, however, Jeremy Engels views the Declaration as a rhetorical strategy that outlined wildly effective arguments justifying revolution against a colonial authority—and then threatened political stability once independence was finally achieved.
Enemyship examines what happened during the latter years of the Revolutionary War and in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, when the rhetorics and energies of revolution began to seem problematic to many wealthy and powerful Americans.
To mitigate this threat, says Engles, the founders of the United States deployed the rhetorics of what he calls "enemyship," calling upon Americans to unite in opposition to their shared national enemies.
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The Forgotten Fifth
Gary B Nash
Harvard University Press, 2006
Library of Congress E269.N3N36 2006 | Dewey Decimal 326.097309033
As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of the country's population was African American. The experiences of these men and women have been largely ignored in the accounts of the colonies' glorious quest for freedom. In this compact volume, Gary B. Nash reorients our understanding of early America, and reveals the perilous choices of the founding fathers that shaped the nation's future.
Nash tells of revolutionary fervor arousing a struggle for freedom that spiraled into the largest slave rebellion in American history, as blacks fled servitude to fight for the British, who promised freedom in exchange for military service. The Revolutionary Army never matched the British offer, and most histories of the period have ignored this remarkable story. The conventional wisdom says that abolition was impossible in the fragile new republic. Nash, however, argues that an unusual convergence of factors immediately after the war created a unique opportunity to dismantle slavery. The founding fathers' failure to commit to freedom led to the waning of abolitionism just as it had reached its peak. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as Nash demonstrates, their decision enabled the ideology of white supremacy to take root, and with it the beginnings of an irreparable national fissure. The moral failure of the Revolution was paid for in the 1860s with the lives of the 600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War.
The Forgotten Fifth is a powerful story of the nation's multiple, and painful, paths to freedom.
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The Founders and Finance
Thomas K. McCraw
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress HJ261.M37 2012 | Dewey Decimal 330.97304
In 1776 the U.S. owed huge sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens but, lacking the power to tax, had no means to repay them. This is the first book to tell the story of how foreign-born financial specialists—the immigrant founders Hamilton and Gallatin—solved the fiscal crisis and set the nation on a path to long-term economic prosperity.
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From Yorktown to Valmy: The Transformation of the French Army in an Age of Revolution
Samuel F. Scott
University Press of Colorado, 1998
Library of Congress UA702.S386 1998 | Dewey Decimal 355.0094409033
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General Thomas Posey: Son of the American Revolution
John Thornton Posey
Michigan State University Press, 1992
Library of Congress E207.P74P67 1992 | Dewey Decimal 973.3092
Revolutionary War general Thomas Posey (1750-1818) lived his life against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic periods in American history. Posey, who played a minor role in the actual War for Independence, went on to participate in the development and foundation of several states in the transappalachian West. His experiences on the late 18th- and early 19th-century American frontier were varied and in a certain sense extraordinary; he served as Indian agent in Illinois Territory; as Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, as U.S. Senator from Louisiana, and as Governor of Indiana during its transition from territorial status to statehood.
His biographer speculates on the contrasting influences of Thomas's ne'er-do-well father, Captain John Posey, and the family's close friend, General George Washington. Posey's progress is then followed as he raises his own family in the newly formed nation. Of particular interest is an appendix containing a detailed analysis of evidence available to support popular 29th-century speculation that Thomas Posey was, in fact, George Washington's illicit son.
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George Washington's Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army
Harry M. Ward
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
Library of Congress E259.W37 2006 | Dewey Decimal 973.34
A well-disciplined army was vital to win American independence, but policing soldiers during the Revolution presented challenges. George Washington’s Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army examines how justice was left to the overlapping duties of special army personnel and how an improvised police force imposed rules and regulations on the common soldier. Historian Harry M. Ward describes these methods of police enforcement, emphasizing the brutality experienced by the enlisted men who were punished severely for even light transgressions. This volume explores the influences that shaped army practice and the quality of the soldiery, the enforcement of military justice, the use of guards as military police, and the application of punishment.
Washington’s army, which adopted the organization and justice code of the British army, labored under the direction of ill-trained and arrogant officers. Ward relates how the enlisted men, who had a propensity for troublemaking and desertion, not only were victims of the double standard that existed between officers and regular troops but also lacked legal protection in the army. The enforcement of military justice afforded the accused with little due process support.
Ward discusses the duties of the various personnel responsible for training and enforcing the standards of behavior, including duty officers, adjutants, brigade majors, inspectors, and sergeant majors. He includes the roles of life guards, camp guards, quarter guards, picket men, and safe guards, whose responsibilities ranged from escorting the commander in chief, intercepting spies and stragglers, and protecting farmers from marauding soldiers to searching for deserters, rounding up unauthorized personnel, and looking for delinquents in local towns and taverns.
George Washington’s Enforcers, which includes sixteen illustrations, also addresses the executions of the period, as both ritual and spectacle, and the deterrent value of capital punishment. Ward explains how Washington himself mixed clemency with severity and examines how army policies tested the mettle of this chief disciplinarian, who operated by the dictates of military necessity as perceived at the time.
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The Georgia Florida Contest
Martha C. Searcy
University of Alabama Press, 1985
Library of Congress F319.S2S44 1985 | Dewey Decimal 973.33
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Almost from the time of Georgia’s settlement by Oglethorpe in 1733, both Georgians and Carolinians had made periodic unsuccessful attempts to conquer the Spanish Castillo San Marcos in St. Augustine; and during the American Revolution (in 1776, 1777, and 1778) the rebels tried without success to take the fortification, which was then a British stronghold. Each of the three expeditions was less successful than the preceding one, and between the formal campaigns vicious partisan warfare between loyalists and rebels devastated much of the area between the Altamaha and St. Johns rivers.
This book presents a detailed history of the three Georgia-Florida campaigns. Indecisive and lacking the glamour of either the contemporary campaigns in the North, or the later campaigns in the South, they appeared isolated from the mainstream of the revolutionary struggle. The rebels were handicapped by divided command, personal quarrels, difficult terrain, and miserable weather. While Searcy emphasizes the military aspects of the period, she also treats the conflict between civil and military authorities, the effects of war on the civilian populace, and the interaction of economic matters with military affairs. Her work clarifies the importance of these military activities in the subsequent British strategy in the occupation of Georgia and the Carolinas.
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A Guide to New Jersey's Revolutionary War Trail: for Families and History Buffs
Di Ionno, Mark
Rutgers University Press, 2000
Library of Congress E263.N5D5 2000 | Dewey Decimal 974.903
Winner of the 2000 New Jersey Academic Alliance Book Award
Hit the road with journalist Mark DiIonno as he takes you on a tour of New Jersey’s extraordinary Revolutionary War history. Listing more than 350 historic sites throughout the state, DiIonno has compiled the most complete guide ever to the Revolutionary War in the Garden State.
New Jersey’s role in the Revolutionary War is widely overlooked. Every school kid learns about the Boston Tea Party but not the Greenwich tea burning; and about the miserable winter at Valley Forge but not Jockey Hollow. Schools fund class trips to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall but not Princeton’s Nassau Hall. To find history in New Jersey, all you need is DiIonno’s book as your guide. His easy-to-read volume helps readers explore the cities and the countryside from Bergen to Cape May County to find out exactly what happened there during the Revolutionary War.
While previously published books center on the highlights — Fort Lee and Washington’s retreat across the state, victories at Trenton and Princeton, the brutal winter encampment at Jockey Hollow and the Battle of Monmouth — DiIonno fills in the blanks. Battlefields, churches, homes of the famous and infamous, cemeteries, parks, taverns, liberty poles, bridges, creeks, hills, museums, encampment sites, lighthouses, historical societies, walking trails, monuments, plaques—if it played a part in or commemorates the Revolutionary War in New Jersey, DiIonno tells you what happened there, the personalities involved, and how to see it for yourself.
The sites are conveniently cataloged by county, with a helpful summary of the area’s war history beginning each chapter. Each entry lists the town and directions to each site, and where appropriate, a complete address, telephone numbers, and hours of operation. Both public and private sites are described, and DiIonno advises readers of which private sites tours can be arranged.
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Guyasuta and the Fall of Indian America
Brady J. Crytzer
Westholme Publishing, 2013
Library of Congress E90.G89C79 2013
A History of the Influential Seneca Leader Who Fought to Maintain Indian Sovereignty During the Bitter Wars for North America Nearly a century before the United States declared the end of the Indian Wars, the fate of Native Americans was revealed in the battle of Fallen Timbers. In 1794, General Anthony Wayne led the first American army— the Legion of the United States—against a unified Indian force in the Ohio country. The Indians were routed and forced to vacate their lands. It was the last of a series of Indian attempts in the East to retain their sovereignty and foreshadowed what would occur across the rest of the continent. In Guyasuta and the Fall of Indian America, historian Brady J. Crytzer traces how American Indians were affected by the wars leading to American Independence through the life of one of the period’s most influential figures. Born in 1724, Guyasuta is perfectly positioned to understand the emerging political landscape of America in the tumultuous eighteenth century. As a sachem of the vaunted Iroquois Confederacy, for nearly fifty years Guyasuta dedicated his life to the preservation and survival of Indian order in a rapidly changing world, whether it was on the battlefield, in the face of powerful imperial armies, or around a campfire negotiating with his French, British, and American counterparts. Guyasuta was present at many significant events in the century, including George Washington’s expedition to Fort Le Boeuf, the Braddock disaster of 1755, Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Battle of Bushy Run in 1763, and the Battle of Oriskany during the American Revolution. Guyasuta’s involvement in the French and British wars and the American War for Independence were all motivated by a desire to retain relevance for Indian society. It was only upon the birth of the United States of America that Guyasuta finally laid his rifle down and watched as his Indian world crumbled beneath his feet. A broken man, debilitated by alcoholism, he died near Pittsburgh in 1794.
Supported by extensive research and full of compelling drama, Guyasuta and the Fall of Indian America unravels the tangled web of alliances, both white and native, and explains how the world of the American Indians could not survive alongside the emergent United States.
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Hessians: Mercenaries, Rebels, and the War for British North America
Brady J. Crytzer
Westholme Publishing, 2015
Library of Congress E268.C+ 2015
Three Stories. Two Worlds. One Revolution. Revealing the German Experience in the American Revolution through the Experiences of an Officer, a Baroness, and a Chaplain
In 1775 the British Empire was in crisis. While it was buried in debt from years of combat against the French, revolution was stirring in its wealthiest North American colonies. To allow the rebellion to fester would cost the British dearly, but to confront it would press their exhausted armed forces to a breaking point. Faced with a nearly impossible decision, the administrators of the world’s largest empire elected to employ the armies of the Holy Roman Empire to suppress the sedition of the American revolutionaries. By 1776 there would be 18,000 German soldiers marching through the wilds of North America, and by war’s end there would be over 30,000.
To the colonists these forces were “mercenaries,” and to the Germans the Americans were “rebels. ”While soldiers of fortune fight for mere profit, the soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire went to war in the name of their country, and were paid little for their services, while their respective kings made fortunes off of their blood and sacrifice among the British ranks. Labeled erroneously as “Hessians,” the armies of the Holy Roman Empire came from six separate German states, each struggling to retain relevance in a newly enlightened and ever-changing world.
In Hessians: Mercenaries, Rebels, and the War for British North America historian Brady J. Crytzer explores the German experience during the American Revolution through the lives of three individuals from vastly different walks of life, all thrust into the maelstrom of North American combat. Here are the stories of a dedicated career soldier, Johann Ewald, captain of a Field-Jäger Corps, who fought from New York to the final battles along the Potomac; Frederika Charlotte Louise von Massow, Baroness von Riedesel, who raced with her young children through the Canadian wilderness to reunite with her long-distant husband; and middle-aged chaplain Philipp Waldeck, who struggled to make sense of it all while accompanying his unit through the exotic yet brutal conditions of the Caribbean and British Florida. Beautifully written, Hessians offers a glimpse into the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of the German armies commanded to destroy it.
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The Ideological Origins of American Federalism
Alison L. LaCroix
Harvard University Press, 2010
Library of Congress JK311.L33 2010 | Dewey Decimal 320.473049
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The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Bernard Bailyn
Harvard University Press, 2017
Library of Congress JA84.U5B3 2017 | Dewey Decimal 320.50973
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a classic of American historical literature—required reading for understanding the Founders’ ideas and their struggles to implement them. In the preface to this 50th anniversary edition, Bernard Bailyn isolates the Founders’ profound concern with the uses and misuses of power.
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The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Bernard Bailyn
Harvard University Press, 1992
Library of Congress JA84.U5B3 1992 | Dewey Decimal 320.50973
To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, "Fulfillment," as a Postscript. Here he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This detailed study of the persistence of the nation's ideological origins adds a new dimension to the book and projects its meaning forward into vital current concerns.
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Improbable Patriot: The Secret History of Monsieur de Beaumarchais, the French Playwright Who Saved the American Revolution
Harlow Giles Unger
University Press of New England, 2011
Library of Congress PQ1956.U54 2011 | Dewey Decimal 842.5
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was an eighteenth-century French inventor, famed playwright, and upstart near-aristocrat in the court of King Louis XVI. In 1776, he conceived an audacious plan to send aid to the American rebels. What’s more, he convinced the king to bankroll the project, and singlehandedly carried it out. By war’s end, he had supplied Washington’s army with most of its weapons and powder, though he was never paid or acknowledged by the United States. To some, he was a dashing hero—a towering intellect who saved the American Revolution. To others, he was pure rogue—a double-dealing adventurer who stopped at nothing to advance his fame and fortune. In fact, he was both, and more: an advisor to kings, an arms dealer, and author of some of the most enduring works of the stage, including The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville.
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An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States
Michael S. Kochin and Michael Taylor
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Library of Congress E310.7.K63 2020 | Dewey Decimal 973.32
Foreign policies and diplomatic missions, combined with military action, were the driving forces behind the growth of the early United States. In an era when the Old and New Worlds were subject to British, French, and Spanish imperial ambitions, the new republic had limited diplomatic presence and minimal public credit. It was vulnerable to hostile forces in every direction. The United States could not have survived, grown, or flourished without the adoption of prescient foreign policies, or without skillful diplomatic operations.
An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history—such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s advocacy of an American System, Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama—are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy.
An Independent Empire tells the stories of the people who defined the early history of America’s international relationships. Throughout the book are brief, entertaining vignettes of often-overlooked intellectuals, spies, diplomats, and statesmen whose actions and decisions shaped the first fifty years of the United States. More than a dozen bespoke maps illustrate that the growth of the early United States was as much a geographical as a political or military phenomenon.
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Inequality in Early America
Carla Gardina Pestana
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
Library of Congress E188.5.I54 1999 | Dewey Decimal 973.2
This book was designed as a collaborative effort to satisfy a long-felt need to pull together many important but separate inquiries into the nature and impact of inequality in colonial and revolutionary America. It also honors the scholarship of Gary Nash, who has contributed much of the leading work in this field. The 15 contributors, who constitute a Who's Who of those who have made important discoveries and reinterpretations of this issue, include Mary Beth Norton on women's legal inequality in early America; Neal Salisbury on Puritan missionaries and Native Americans; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on elite and poor women's work in early Boston; Peter Wood and Philip Morgan on early American slavery; as well as Gary Nash himself writing on Indian/white history. This book is a vital contribution to American self-understanding and to historical analysis.
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Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans
Joyce Appleby
Harvard University Press, 2000
Library of Congress E301.A65 2000 | Dewey Decimal 973
Born after the Revolution, the first generation of Americans inherited a truly new world—and, with it, the task of working out the terms of Independence. Anyone who started a business, marketed a new invention, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication was helping to fashion the world’s first liberal society. These are the people we encounter in Inheriting the Revolution, a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and free enterprise into contested realities.
Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Appleby tells myriad intersecting stories of how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society in politics, economics, reform, religion, and culture. They also had to grapple with the new distinction of free and slave labor, with all its divisive social entailments; the rout of Enlightenment rationality by the warm passions of religious awakening; the explosion of small business opportunities for young people eager to break out of their parents’ colonial cocoon. Few in the nation escaped the transforming intrusiveness of these changes. Working these experiences into a vivid picture of American cultural renovation, Appleby crafts an extraordinary—and deeply affecting—account of how the first generation established its own culture, its own nation, its own identity.
The passage of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel; this book shows how, in the early nineteenth century, the very idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States.
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Inventing Ethan Allen
John J. Duffy and H. Nicholas Muller
University Press of New England, 2014
Library of Congress E207.A4D84 2014 | Dewey Decimal 974.303092
Since 1969, Ethan Allen has been the subject of three biographical studies, all of which indulge in sustaining and revitalizing the image of Allen as a physically imposing Vermont yeoman, a defender of the rights of Americans, an eloquent military hero, and a master of many guises, from rough frontiersman to gentleman philosopher. Seeking the authentic Ethan Allen, the authors of this volume ask: How did that Ethan Allen secure his place in popular culture? As they observe, this spectacular persona leaves little room for a more accurate assessment of Allen as a self-interested land speculator, rebellious mob leader, inexperienced militia officer, and truth-challenged man who would steer Vermont into the British Empire. Drawing extensively from the correspondence in Ethan Allen and his Kin and a wide range of historical, political, and cultural sources, Duffy and Muller analyze the factors that led to Ethan Allen’s two-hundred-year-old status as the most famous figure in Vermont’s past. Placing facts against myths, the authors reveal how Allen acquired and retained his iconic image, how the much-repeated legends composed after his death coincide with his life, why recollections of him are synonymous with the story of Vermont, and why some Vermonters still assign to Allen their own cherished and idealized values.
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Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution
John A. Nagy
Westholme Publishing, 2010
Library of Congress E279.N34 2010
The Critical Role of Espionage During the War of Independence and the Techniques Spies Used
During the American Revolution, espionage was critical to the successes and failures of both Continental and British efforts, and those employed in cloakand- dagger operations always risked death. While the most notorious episode of spying during the war—the Benedict Arnold affair—was a failure, most intelligence operations succeeded. Spycraft was no more wholly embraced than by the American commander-in-chief, George Washington. Washington relied on a vast spy network and personally designed sophisticated battle plan deceptions and counterintelligence efforts, some surprisingly modern in form. In Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution, award-winning author John A. Nagy briefly traces the history of spy techniques from ancient China through Elizabethan England before embarking on the various techniques used by spies on both sides of the war to exchange secret information. These methods included dictionary codes, diplomatic ciphers, dead drops, hidden compartments (such as a hollowed-out bullet or a woman’s garter), and even musical notation, as well as efforts of counterintelligence, including “Black Chambers,” where postal correspondence was read by cryptologists. Throughout, the author provides examples of the various codes and ciphers employed, many of which have not been previously described. In addition, the author analyzes some of the key spy rings operating during the war, most notably the Culper ring that provided information to Washington from inside British-controlled New York City. Based on nearly two decades of primary research, including the author’s discovery of previously unrecognized spies and methods, Invisible Ink is a major contribution to the history of conflict and technology.
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Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, Volume Eight
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Library of Congress PS2384.I7 1997 | Dewey Decimal 813.3
Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief, for his previous novel, Pierre, had shocked readers and brought down universal castigation.
This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, Volume Eight, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1982
Library of Congress PS2380.F68 vol. 8 | Dewey Decimal 813.3
Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief, for his previous novel, Pierre, had shocked readers and brought down universal castigation.
This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail
Timothy McGrath
Westholme Publishing, 2010
Library of Congress E207.B2M345 2010 | Dewey Decimal 355
The Life of the First Captain of the United States Navy
Finalist for the Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Excellence in Naval Literature
“Ashore as well as at sea, Tim McGrath paints an informative, engaging and highly entertaining portrait of this worthy but neglected hero of American independence. The author shows us a man who was a magnificent embodiment of common sense—and uncommon courage and dedication. That such a work is long overdue makes its achievement all the more pleasurable.”—Wall Street Journal
“Combining sophisticated use of sources with a pleasing writing style, McGrath masterfully rescues a father of the U.S. Navy from unmerited eclipse.”—Publishers Weekly
“A nearly indispensable addition to U.S. Navy collections.”— Booklist
“McGrath employs exemplary narrative style in this work. . . . In John Barry, the author adroitly juxtaposes maritime history, narratives of naval combat, and early U.S. social history.”—New England Quarterly
“McGrath is a compelling and lucid writer. He brings Barry to life, makes battles understandable, and provides the clearest description of Barry's 1778 capture of the British transport ships Mermaid and Kitty that this reviewer has seen.”—Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
“A great read and an absorbing account of a drama-filled life.”—Naval History
“Well researched, well written, and a pleasure to read, this book restores John Barry to the important place he once held as one of our nation’s great heroes. It is a tale of high adventure and personal courage and you will not want to put it down.” —JAMES L. NELSON, author of George Washington’s Secret Navy
“Readers of this vivid biography will imagine they smell the ocean’s salt air and the sulfurous fumes of gunpowder as they navigate these action-packed pages. Fans of Horatio Hornblower and Lucky Jack Aubrey will rejoice in discovering their real-life American counterpart.”—GREGORY J. URWIN, author of Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island
The man regarded as “the Father of the American Navy” returns to the quarterdeck in John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail, the first comprehensive biography of this legendary officer in generations. Son of a hardscrabble Irish farmer from County Wexford, Barry was sent to sea as a child, arriving in Philadelphia during the restless decade before the American Revolution. Brave and ambitious, he ascended the ratlines to become a successful merchant captain at a young age, commanding the most prestigious ship in the colonies and recording the fastest known day of sail in the century.
Volunteering to fight for the Continental cause, Barry saw his star rise during the War for Independence. As captain of the Lexington, Raleigh, and Alliance, Barry faced down broadsides, mutinies, and even a fleet of icebergs. He captured the first enemy warship taken by a Continental vessel and fought the last battle of the American Revolution. His hard-won victory over two British warships simultaneously garnered him international notoriety, while his skill as a seafarer and cool temper established Barry as a worthy foe among British captains. Without a ship during the winter of 1776-77, the ever resourceful Barry lead a battery of naval artillery at the battle of Princeton. With peace came a historic voyage to China, where Barry helped open trade with that reclusive empire. In 1794, President Washington named Barry as the first commissioned officer in the new United States Navy. Given the title of commodore, Barry ended his career during America’s naval war with France, teaching the ropes to a new generation of officers, most notably Stephen Decatur.
Drawn from primary source documents from around the world, John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail by Tim McGrath brings the story of this self-made American back to life in a major new biography.
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John Robert Shaw: An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777–1807
Oressa M. Teagarden
Ohio University Press, 1992
Library of Congress E275.S53 1992 | Dewey Decimal 973.38
In the summer of 1807 more than a thousand subscribers from New England to Tennessee paid for the initial printing of The Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw: A Narrative of the Life and Travels of the Well-Digger, now resident of Lexington, Kentucky, Written by Himself. Shaw had come to Rhode Island as a British redcoat to put down the colonial rebellion. Through various quirks of fate, including being taken a prisoner of war, he ended up fighting with the Americans. Shaw was an exuberant spirit whose rowdy drinking bouts and related predicaments alternated with periods of wholehearted efforts at reform. His autobiography, written while he recuperated from injuries from one of several explosions (an occupational hazard for the frontier well-digger), is an articulate and entertaining record of the Revolutionary War era.
A 1930 printing of Shaw’s autobiography was rescued from the trash by an alert librarian in Kentucky in 1950. She passed the tattered copy on to journalist Oressa M. Teagarden, who became intrigued with Shaw’s story and spent much of her free time over the next two decades finding out more about the ebullient American. On Teagarden’s death, co-editor Jeanne Crabtree assumed the task of making Shaw’s authentic and colorful view of early America available to a new generation of readers.
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Jonathan Odell: The Loyalist Poet of the American Revolution
Cynthia Dubin Edelberg
Duke University Press, 1987
Library of Congress PR9199.2.O35Z64 1987 | Dewey Decimal 811.3
Jonathan Odell's live and writings give us insight into the American Revolution by revealing Loyalist ideology—the ambitious few have led the gullible multitude to slaughter—and he rails against the British military for fighting a war of containment aimed at bringing the rebel leadership to negotiation. This policy effectually trapped the Loyalists between the British army, which ignored them, and the rebels, who despised them. One of the best-educated of the colonialists, Odell, a physician turned Anglican minister and then writer, lived the gamut of experience: powerful friends sustained him and the British commanders-in-chief Sir William Howe, Henry Clinton, and Sir Guy Carleton employed him; nevertheless, during the war he was a lonely exile ("Tory hunters" forced him from his home in 1775), and, at the end of the war, when his hope for reconciliation between the Loyalists and the Americans came to nothing, he reluctantly emigrated to Canada. Here is a voice, all but silenced for over two hundred years, that must now be heard if we are to better understand the American Revolution.
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Kidnapping the Enemy: The Special Operations to Capture Generals Charles Lee and Richard Prescott
Christian M. McBurney
Westholme Publishing, 2013
Library of Congress E281.M44 2014 | Dewey Decimal 973.3710922
The Daring Raid to Kidnap a British General in Order to Gain Freedom for the Highest Ranking Continental Officer Captured During the American Revolution
On the night of December 12, 1776, while on a reconnaissance mission in New Jersey, Lieutenant Colonel William Harcourt and Cornet Banastre Tarleton of the British dragoons learned from Loyalist informers that Major General Charles Lee, the second-in-command in the Continental army behind only George Washington, was staying at a tavern at nearby Basking Ridge. Gaining valuable information as they rode, by threatening captured American soldiers with death if Lee’s whereabouts was not revealed, Harcourt and Tarleton, surrounded the tavern, and after a short but violent struggle, captured him. The dragoons returned through a hostile country by a different route, arriving safely at their British post at New Brunswick with their quarry in hand. With Lee’s capture, the British were confident the rebellion would soon be over.
Stung by Lee’s kidnapping, the Americans decided to respond with their own special operation, perhaps the most outstanding one of the war. On the dark night of July 10, 1777, Lieutenant Colonel William Barton led a handpicked party in whaleboats across Narragansett Bay—carefully avoiding British navy ships—to Newport, Rhode Island. Although the town was occupied by more than 3,000 enemy soldiers, after landing Barton led his men up a hidden path and stealthily hurried to a farmhouse where General Richard Prescott had taken to spending nights. Surrounding the house, they forced open the doors and seized the sleeping Prescott, as well as his aidede- camp and a sentry, and then quickly returned to their waiting boats. Despite British artillerymen firing rockets and cannon to alert the British vessels in the bay, the bold band of Americans reached the mainland safely. Not only had Barton kidnapped a British major general who could be exchanged for Lee, he had removed from action a man who had gained a reputation for his harsh treatment of American Patriots.
In Kidnapping the Enemy: The Special Operations to Capture Generals Charles Lee and Richard Prescott, Christian M. McBurney relates the full story of each of these remarkable raids, the subsequent exchange of the two generals, and the impact of these kidnappings on the Revolutionary War. He then follows the subsequent careers of the major players, including Lee, Barton, Prescott, and Tarleton. The author completes his narrative with descriptions of other attempts to kidnap high-ranking military officers and government officials during the war, including ones organized by and against George Washington. The low success rate of these operations makes the raids that captured Lee and Prescott even more impressive.
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Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination
Joyce Oldham. Appleby
Harvard University Press, 1992
Library of Congress E163.A67 1992 | Dewey Decimal 320.510973
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Lincoln and the American Founding
Lucas E. Morel
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Library of Congress E457.2 | Dewey Decimal 973.7092
In this persuasive work of intellectual history, Lucas E. Morel argues that the most important influence on Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and practice was what he learned from the leading figures of and documents from the birth of the United States. In this systematic account of those principles, Morel compellingly demonstrates that to know Lincoln well is to understand thoroughly the founding of America.
With each chapter describing a particular influence, Morel leads readers from the Founding Father, George Washington; to the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution; to the founding compromise over slavery; and finally to a consideration of how the original intentions of the Founding Fathers should be respected in light of experience, progress, and improvements over time. Within these key discussions, Morel shows that without the ideals of the American Revolution, Lincoln’s most famous speeches would be unrecognizable, and the character of the nation would have lost its foundation on the universal principles of human equality, individual liberty, and government by the consent of the governed.
Lincoln thought that the principles of human equality and individual rights could provide common ground for a diverse people to live as one nation and that some old things, such as the political ideals of the American founding, were worth preserving. He urged Americans to be vigilant in maintaining the institutions of self-government and to exercise and safeguard the benefits of freedom for future generations. Morel posits that adopting the way of thinking and speaking Lincoln advocated, based on the country’s founding, could help mend our current polarized discourse and direct the American people to employ their common government on behalf of a truly common good.
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The Long Retreat: The Calamitous Defense of New Jersey, 1776
Lefkowitz, Arthur S
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Library of Congress E263.N5L44 1999 | Dewey Decimal 973.33209749
Winner of the 1998 Best Book on the Revolution published in 1998 by the Board of Governors of the American Revolution Round Table | Named 1999 Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
On the morning of November 20, 1776, General Charles Cornwallis overran patriot positions at Fort Lee, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. The attack threw George Washington's army into turmoil. Thus began an American retreat across the state, which ended only after the battered rebels crossed the Delaware river at Trenton on December 7. It was a three-week campaign that marked the most dramatic and desperate period of the War for Independence. In The Long Retreat, Arthur Lefkowitz has written the first book-length study of this critical campaign. He adds compelling new detail to the narrative, and offers the most comprehensive account in the literature of the American retreat to the Delaware and of the British pursuit. What emerges is a history misconceptions about the movements of the armies, the intentions of their leaders, and the choices available to rebel commanders and their British counterparts. Lefkowitz presents a patriot military pounded into desperate straights by the forces of the Crown, but in the end more resilient and wily than most previous scholarship has allowed. If brought low over November and December of 1776, Washington's battalions were still a force to reckon with as they pulled away from the advancing British. Despite serious losses in material and personnel, Washington managed to keep his units operational; and even while making mistakes, he sought to consolidate patriot regiments and longed for a chance to counterattack. The Christmas night riposte at Trenton, a dramatic reversal of fortune in any case, stemmed from measures the rebel Commander-in-Chief had initiated even as he completed his retrogade across New Jersey. How all of this came about emerges and crisp narrative of The Long Retreat. It is the definitive book on a crucial chapter in the history of American Arms.
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Monmouth Court House: The Battle that Made the American Army
Joseph G. Bilby
Westholme Publishing, 2010
Library of Congress E241.M7B55 2010 | Dewey Decimal 973.334
The Strategic Victory that Established the Continental Army as a True Fighting Force
The battle of Monmouth Court House, New Jersey, is among the most important battles in the history of the American Army. Well known in American mythology as the battle where Molly Pitcher fought alongside her fallen husband, Monmouth Court House is regarded by historians as the moment when the image of the American army in both Europe and the colonies was transformed from that of a rag-tag band of ill-trained civilians to that of a disciplined, well-guided, professional military unit. In June 1778, British General Henry Clinton’s army evacuated Philadelphia and struck out across “the Jerseys” on its way back to New York City. George Washington’s Continental Army, retrained and confident after enduring a winter at Valley Forge and supplemented by a large number of fresh New Jersey militia, marched in pursuit. About 50 miles south of New York City, the armies clashed at Monmouth Court House on June 28, in the last major Revolutionary War battle in the north. Essentially a draw, the battle marked the first time in the war that the Continental Army was able to hold a battlefield, fighting the full force of the British army to a standstill. Monmouth Court House: The Battle that Made the American Army by Joseph G. Bilby and Katherine Bilby Jenkins is the story of this battle, how it came to be, and its influence on the course of the war and American history.
The authors set Monmouth Court House within the context of the American Revolution and the civil war between Tories and Whigs that erupted in New Jersey during that time. The entire campaign and battle are described, including an analysis of the commanders, personnel, organization, training, and weapons of both armies. The book also assesses the historiography and folklore of the battle, including the story of the real “Molly Pitcher,” the use of the battleground as Civil War muster-in camp, its eventual status as Monmouth Battleground State Park, and current efforts at interpretation and battlefield archaeology and how they have changed our understanding of the battle.
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My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams
Abigail Adams
Harvard University Press, 2007
Library of Congress E322.A4 2007 | Dewey Decimal 973.44092
Spanning nearly forty years, the letters collected in this volume form the most significant correspondence—and reveal one of the most intriguing and inspiring partnerships—in American history.
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Nathan Hale: The Life and Death of America's First Spy
M. William Phelps
University Press of New England, 2015
Library of Congress E280.H2P38 2014
Although famous for his purported last words—“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—few people know the real Nathan Hale. M. William Phelps brings into focus the life of this famed patriot and first spy of the American Revolution, charting Hale’s rural childhood, his education at Yale, and his work as a schoolteacher. Like many young Americans, he was soon drawn into the colonies’ war for independence and became a captain in Washington’s army. When the general was in need of a spy, Hale willingly rose to the challenge, gathering intelligence behind British lines on Long Island, and in the end bravely sacrificing his life for the sake of American liberty. Using Hale’s own journals and letters as well as testimonies from his friends and contemporaries, Phelps depicts the Revolution as it was seen from the ground. From the confrontation in Boston to the battle for New York City, readers experience what life was like for an ordinary soldier in the struggling Continental Army. In this impressive, well-researched biography, Phelps separates historical fact from long-standing myth to reveal the truth about Nathan Hale, a young man who deserves to be remembered as an original American patriot.
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New Jersey in the American Revolution
Mitnick, Barbara J
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Library of Congress E263.N5N715 2005 | Dewey Decimal 973.309749
Barbara J. Mitnick has edited a remarkably comprehensive anthology, bringing new life to the rich and turbulent late eighteenth-century period in New Jersey. Originally conceived as a legacy of the state's 225th Anniversary of the Revolution Celebration Commission and sponsored by the Washington Association of New Jersey, the volume brings together contributions by twelve outstanding and recognized experts on New Jersey history.
Chapters explore topics including New Jersey as the "Crossroads of the Revolution," important military campaigns, the 1776 Constitution, and the significant contribution of blacks, Native Americans, and women. Reflecting the contemporary view that the war's impact extended beyond military engagements, original essays also discuss the fine and decorative arts, literature, architecture, archaeology, and social and economic conditions. The reader is presented with a picture of life in New Jersey both separate from as well as connected to the fight for American independence and the establishment of the nation.
Fresh and significant observations, including the fact that soldiers fought 238 battles on New Jersey soil (more than any other state) and that the social and political changes resulting from the war were more revolutionary than evolutionary make this accessibly written, beautifully illustrated volume appeal to the lay reader as well as scholars of New Jersey and Revolutionary War history.
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The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784, Vol. 9
Robert Morris
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Library of Congress E302.M82 1973 | Dewey Decimal 973.30924
Although Robert Morris (1734-1806), "the Financier of the American Revolution," was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, a powerful committee chairman in the Continental Congress, an important figure in Pennsylvania politics, and perhaps the most prominent businessman of his day, he is today least known of the great national leaders of the Revolutionary era.This oversight is being rectified by this definitive publication project that transcribes and carefully annotates the Office of Finance diary, correspondence, and other official papers written by Morris during his administration as superintendent of finance from 1781 to 1784.
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The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784, Volume 6
Robert Morris
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984
Library of Congress E302.M82 1973 | Dewey Decimal 973.30924
Although Robert Morris (1734-1806), "the Financier of the American Revolution," was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, a powerful committee chairman in the Continental Congress, an important figure in Pennsylvania politics, and perhaps the most prominent businessman of his day, he is today least known of the great national leaders of the Revolutionary era.This oversight is being rectified by this definitive publication project that transcribes and carefully annotates the Office of Finance diary, correspondence, and other official papers written by Morris during his administration as superintendent of finance from 1781 to 1784.
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The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784, Volume 8
Robert Morris
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
Library of Congress E302.M82 1973 | Dewey Decimal 973.30924
Although Robert Morris (1734-1806), "the Financier of the American Revolution," was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, a powerful committee chairman in the Continental Congress, an important figure in Pennsylvania politics, and perhaps the most prominent businessman of his day, he is today least known of the great national leaders of the Revolutionary era.This oversight is being rectified by this definitive publication project that transcribes and carefully annotates the Office of Finance diary, correspondence, and other official papers written by Morris during his administration as superintendent of finance from 1781 to 1784.
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The Partisan: A Romance of Revolution
William Gilmore Simms
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
Library of Congress PS2848.P2 2011 | Dewey Decimal 813.3
The writings of William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) provide a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all of its regional diversity. Simms's account of the region is more comprehensive than that of any other author of his time; he treats the major intellectual and social issues of the South and depicts the bonds and tensions among all of its inhabitants. By the mid-1840s Simms's novels were so well known that Edgar Allan Poe could call him "the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced." The thirteenth volume in the ongoing Arkansas Edition of the works of Simms, The Partisan is the first in order of publication of Simms's Revolutionary War romances. Although Simms took advantage of the novelist's prerogative to invent characters and events for his saga, he did so with a historian's eye, making extensive use of official histories; letters, diaries, and other documents; family traditions; and unpublished and published memoirs. Simms gives human interest to the novel's historical framework with two love triangles, mixing romantic conventions with gritty realism that outlines the four classes of Simms's ideal society. The Partisan is also remarkable among Simms's work for its use of symbols, indicating, perhaps, a new intention for the novel. The result is a satisfying work of literary art enlivened with adventure and humor while remaining true to the history behind it.
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The Pennsylvania Associators, 1747–1777
Joseph Seymour
Westholme Publishing, 2012
Library of Congress E263.P4S48 2012
The First Complete History of the Military Force of Colonial Pennsylvania, a Volunteer Body Created as a Practical Response to the Ideal of Pacifism
Known at various times as the Military Association of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Association, or simply Associators, this long-neglected organization represented a new constituency in Pennsylvania politics and by extension, a new American response to arbitrary rule. Organized on December 7, 1747, at Philadelphia, the Military Association, an all-volunteer military establishment pledged to the defense of Pennsylvania, served as the de facto armed force for Pennsylvania, a colony whose leadership, a loose coalition of Quaker and German pacifists, land barons, and merchants, foreswore military preparedness on religious and ideological grounds. For the Associators, including their most noted supporter, Benjamin Franklin, a defenseless colony was no longer practical. During the War of Austrian Succession and again in the Seven Years’ War, Associators organized defense efforts in defiance of the Pennsylvania colonial leadership. Associators also helped defend American Indian refugees against the infamous Paxton Boys in 1764. By 1775, Associators found themselves as the colony’s only legitimate military leadership and, by capitalizing on electoral gains in the lead up to the American Revolution, Associators assumed offices vacated by former officials. During the critical battles of 1776, the Associators in their distinctive round hats and brown coats proved a decisive asset to the Continental Army.
In The Pennsylvania Associators, 1747–1777, historian Joseph Seymour has painstakingly researched primary source materials in order to write the first comprehensive history of this influential organization. Seymour demonstrates that while the Pennsylvania Associators contributed to success in the campaigns in which they fought, particularly the battles of Trenton and Princeton, a more fascinating and important investigation are the concerns that motivated these men. Associators considered military service in defense of their religious and civil liberties as a natural right. For three decades, Associators demonstrated that belief in and out of uniform. In a colony founded on religious exceptionalism, Associators saw themselves as faithful soldiers and active agents against leadership by entitlement, a principle guiding our government today.
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A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence
John Shy
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Library of Congress E230.S5 1990 | Dewey Decimal 973.33
A series of essays about the social, political, and intellectual dimensions of the Revolutionary War
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The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal
Karim Tiro
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Library of Congress E99.O45T57 2011 | Dewey Decimal 974.70049755
Between 1765 and 1845, the Oneida Indian Nation weathered a trio of traumas: war, dispossession, and division. During the American War of Independence, the Oneidas became the revolutionaries’ most important Indian allies. They undertook a difficult balancing act, helping the patriots while trying to avoid harming their Iroquois brethren. Despite the Oneidas’ wartime service, they were dispossessed of nearly all their lands through treaties with the state of New York. In eighty years the Oneidas had gone from being an autonomous, powerful people in their ancestral homeland to being residents of disparate, politically exclusive reservation communities separated by up to nine hundred miles and completely surrounded by non-Indians. The Oneidas’ physical, political, and emotional division persists to this day. Even for those who stayed put, their world changed more in cultural, ecological, and demographic terms than at any time before or since. Oneidas of the post-Revolutionary decades were reluctant pioneers, undertaking more of the adaptations to colonized life than any other generation. Amid such wrenching change, maintaining continuity was itself a creative challenge. The story of that extraordinary endurance lies at the heart of this book.
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Protecting the Empire’s Frontier: Officers of the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot during Its North American Service, 1767–1776
Steven M. Baule
Ohio University Press, 2013
Library of Congress UA651 18th.B38 2014 | Dewey Decimal 356.1092241
Protecting the Empire’s Frontier tells stories of the roughly eighty officers who served in the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot, which served British interests in America during the crucial period from 1767 through 1776. The Royal Irish was one of the most wide-ranging regiments in America, with companies serving on the Illinois frontier, at Fort Pitt, and in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with some companies taken as far afield as Florida, Spanish Louisiana, and present-day Maine. When the regiment was returned to England in 1776, some of the officers remained in America on staff assignments. Others joined provincial regiments, and a few joined the American revolutionary army, taking up arms against their king and former colleagues.
Using a wide range of archival resources previously untapped by scholars, the text goes beyond just these officers’ service in the regiment and tells the story of the men who included governors, a college president, land speculators, physicians, and officers in many other British regular and provincial regiments. Included in these ranks were an Irishman who would serve in the U.S. Congress and as an American general at Yorktown; a landed aristocrat who represented Bath as a member of Parliament; and a naval surgeon on the ship transporting Benjamin Franklin to France. This is the history of the American Revolutionary period from a most gripping and everyday perspective.
An epilogue covers the Royal Irish’s history after returning to England and its part in defending against both the Franco-Spanish invasion attempt and the Gordon Rioters. With an essay on sources and a complete bibliography, this is a treat for professional and amateur historians alike.
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Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution
William B. Warner
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress E216.W29 2013 | Dewey Decimal 973.3
The fledgling United States fought a war to achieve independence from Britain, but as John Adams said, the real revolution occurred “in the minds and hearts of the people” before the armed conflict ever began. Putting the practices of communication at the center of this intellectual revolution, Protocols of Liberty shows how American patriots—the Whigs—used new forms of communication to challenge British authority before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
To understand the triumph of the Whigs over the Brit-friendly Tories, William B. Warner argues that it is essential to understand the communication systems that shaped pre-Revolution events in the background. He explains the shift in power by tracing the invention of a new political agency, the Committee of Correspondence; the development of a new genre for political expression, the popular declaration; and the emergence of networks for collective political action, with the Continental Congress at its center. From the establishment of town meetings to the creation of a new postal system and, finally, the Declaration of Independence, Protocols of Liberty reveals that communication innovations contributed decisively to nation-building and continued to be key tools in later American political movements, like abolition and women’s suffrage, to oppose local custom and state law.
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Quebec During the American Invasion, 1775-1776: The Journal of Francois Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, and Jenkin Williams
Michael P. Gabriel
Michigan State University Press, 2005
Library of Congress E231.B125 2005 | Dewey Decimal 971.445102
Available for the first time in English, the 1776 journal of François Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, and Jenkin Williams provides an insight into the failure to incite rebellion in Quebec by American revolutionaries. While other sources have shown how British soldiers and civilians and the French-Canadian gentry (the seigneurs) responded to the American invasion of 1775–1776, this journal focuses on French-Canadian peasants (les habitants) who made up the vast majority of the population; in other words, the journal helps explain why Quebec did not become the "fourteenth colony."
After American forces were expelled from Quebec in early 1776, the British governor, Sir Guy Carleton, sent three trusted envoys to discover who had collaborated with the rebels from the south. They traveled to fifty-six parishes and missions in the Quebec and Trois Rivières district, discharging disloyal militia officers and replacing them with faithful subjects. They prepared a report on each parish, revealing actions taken to support the Americans or the king. Baby and his colleagues documented a wide range of responses. Some habitants enlisted with the Americans; others supplied them with food, firewood, and transportation. Some habitants refused to cooperate with the king’s soldiers. In some parishes, women were the Americans’ most zealous supporters. Overall, the Baby Journal clearly reveals that the habitants played an important, but often overlooked, role in the American invasion.
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The Queen's American Rangers
Donald J. Gara
Westholme Publishing, 2015
Library of Congress E277.6.Q6G37 2015
Founded by the Legendary Robert Rogers and Later Led by John Graves Simcoe, a Loyalist Unit that Fought Alongside the British Army Against the American Patriots
Prior to the British attack on Long Island in August 1776, French and Indian War hero Robert Rogers organized a regiment to join the fight—but not on the side of his native New Hampshire. Named in honor of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, Rogers’s regiment recruited the bulk of its soldiers from the large number of Loyalist refugees on Staten Island who had fled from New York. Rogers’s command of the unit was short-lived, however, after a humiliating defeat in late October by a surprise attack on his headquarters. Under new leadership, the unit played a decisive role and suffered heavy casualties at the battle of Brandywine that brought them their first favorable attention from the British high command. With this performance, and under the able leadership of John Graves Simcoe, the Queen’s American Rangers—sometimes known as “Simcoe’s Rangers”—were frequently assigned to serve alongside British regular troops in many battles, including Monmouth, Springfield, Charleston, and Yorktown. Receiving frequent high praise from Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton, the Commander in Chief of the British Army in America, the unit was placed on the American Establishment of the British Army in May 1779, a status conferred on provincial units that had performed valuable services during the war, and was renamed the 1st American Regiment. Before the end of the war, the rangers were fully incorporated into the British regular army, one of only four Loyalist units to be so honored.
The Queen’s American Rangers by historian Donald J. Gara is the first book-length account of this storied unit. Based on extensive primary source research, the book traces the complete movements, command changes, and battle performances of the rangers, from their first muster to their formal incorporation into the British Army and ultimate emigration to Canada on land grants conferred by a grateful British crown.
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Reading the Early Republic
Robert A. FERGUSON
Harvard University Press, 2004
Library of Congress E209.F46 2004 | Dewey Decimal 973.3072
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Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution
John A. Nagy
Westholme Publishing, 2008
Library of Congress E209.N34 2007 | Dewey Decimal 973.3
How General Washington Avoided the Peril From Within His Own Forces
"It gives me great pain to be obliged to solicit the attention of the honorable Congress to the state of the army...the greater part of the army is in a state not far from mutiny...I know not to whom to impute this failure, but I am of the opinion, if the evil is not immediately remedied and more punctuality observed in future, the army must absolutely break up."—George Washington, September 1775
Mutiny has always been a threat to the integrity of armies, particularly under trying circumstances, and since Concord and Lexington, mutiny had been the Continental Army's constant traveling companion. It was not because the soldiers lacked resolve to overturn British rule or had a lack of faith in their commanders. It was the scarcity of food—during winter months it was not uncommon for soldiers to subsist on a soup of melted snow, a few peas, and a scrap of fat—money, clothing, and proper shelter, that forced soldiers to desert or organize resistance. Mutiny was not a new concept for George Washington. During his service in the French and Indian War he had tried men under his command for the offense and he knew that disaffection and lack of morale in an army was a greater danger than an armed enemy.
In Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution, John A. Nagy provides one of the most original and valuable contributions to American Revolutionary War history in recent times. Mining previously ignored British and American primary source documents and reexamining other period writings, Nagy has corrected misconceptions about known events, such as the Pennsylvania Line Mutiny, while identifying for the first time previously unknown mutinies. Covering both the army and the navy, Nagy relates American officers' constant struggle to keep up the morale of their troops, while highlighting British efforts to exploit this potentially fatal flaw.
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Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey
Thomas Dring
Westholme Publishing, 2010
Library of Congress E281.D79 2010
A First-hand Account of Prison Experience in the American Revolution
“Among the many events which took place during the Revolutionary War from its commencement to its termination [are] the cruelties inflicted upon that unfortunate class of men who had the misfortune to be numbered among the prisoners [of the British] and more particularly those whom the dreadful chance of war had placed on board their prison ships at New York.” So begins the remarkable narrative of Thomas Dring. In 1824, Dring was an aging man of 65, retired in his native state of Rhode Island. Forty-two years before, he, like thousands of other young men, had been caught up in the American cause. In 1782, he had been captured by the British and sentenced to the infamous prison ship Jersey, a demasted hulk anchored in the East River off New York City. It is estimated that more than 11,000 men perished on the British prison ships over the course of the war, and their bones regularly washed up on the shore long after hostilities ceased. Dring survived to tell the tale, and in 1824, he decided to do just that. He was motivated partly because the fate of the prisoners was beginning to be doubted, that their hardships were thought to have been grossly exaggerated, and even that the entire experience had never occurred.
This book publishes for the first time the complete text of Dring’s handwritten manuscript, a major primary-source document, in which he describes the horrible conditions, treatment by guards, and experiences that he and others endured during captivity. Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey is a plea not to forget but instead to remember the inhumanity of the captors and the sacrifices of the captives—a message that continues to resonate today. Editor David Swain has provided an introductory essay and extensive notes that contain background information and historical documentation to accompany and illuminate the original manuscript.
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Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War
Michael McDonnell
University of Massachusetts Press
Library of Congress E209.R39 2013 | Dewey Decimal 973.3
In today’s United States, the legacy of the American Revolution looms large. From presidential speeches to bestselling biographies, from conservative politics to school pageants, everybody knows something about the Revolution. Yet what was a messy, protracted, divisive, and destructive war has calcified into a glorified founding moment of the American nation. Disparate events with equally diverse participants have been reduced to a few key scenes and characters, presided over by well-meaning and wise old men. Recollections of the Revolution did not always take today’s form. In this lively collection of essays, historians and literary scholars consider how the first three generations of American citizens interpreted their nation’s origins. The volume introduces readers to a host of individuals and groups both well known and obscure, from Molly Pitcher and “forgotten father” John Dickinson to African American Baptists in Georgia and antebellum pacifists. They show how the memory of the Revolution became politicized early in the nation’s history, as different interests sought to harness its meaning for their own ends. No single faction succeeded, and at the outbreak of the Civil War the American people remained divided over how to remember the Revolution.
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Rereading the Revolution: The Turn-of-the-Century American Revolutionary War Novel
Anita Lawson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000
Library of Congress PS374.H5L37 2000 | Dewey Decimal 813.08109358
Approximately fifty historical novels dealing with the American Revolution were published in the United States from 1896 to 1906. Benjamin S. Lawson critically examines the narrative strategies employed in these works and the ways in which fiction is made to serve the purpose of vivifying national history.
Writing within the conventions of the historical romance, these authors created plots that reflect the enveloping concerns of the War for Independence, such as the young American woman who often must choose between suitors on opposite sides in the wider conflict.
Lawson concludes that these works reassured readers of the worth of an Anglo-American heritage. They were escapist fantasies to the degree that they failed to confront contemporary realities of crisis and change: the New Immigration, urbanization and industrialization, labor strife, the plight of the poor, and agitation on behalf of women and ethnic minorities.
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The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence
Edited by John C. Dann
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Library of Congress E275.A2R48 | Dewey Decimal 973.38
A classic oral history of the American Revolution, The Revolution Remembered uses 79 first-hand accounts from veterans of the war to provide the reader with the feel of what it must have been like to fight and live through America's bloody battle for independence.
"In a book fairly bursting with feats of daring, perhaps the most spectacular accomplishment of them all is this volume's transformation of its readers into the grandchildren of Revolutionary War soldiers. . . . An amazing gathering of 79 surrogate Yankee grandparents who tell us in their own words what they saw with their own eyes."—Elaine F. Weiss, Christian Science Monitor
"Fascinating. . . . [The soldiers'] details fill in significant shadows of history."—Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times
"It's still good fun two centuries later, overhearing these experiences of the tumult of everyday life and seeing a front-lines view of one of the most unusual armies ever to fight, let alone win."—Richard Martin, Wall Street Journal
"One of the most important primary source discoveries from the era. A unique and fresh perspective."—Paul G. Levine, Los Angeles Times
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The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775-1783
Leiby, Adrian C.
Rutgers University Press, 1980
Library of Congress F142.B4L4 1980 | Dewey Decimal 974.92103
After November 1776, the Hackensack Valley--located in northeastern New Jersey and Rockland County, New York--lay between the invading British army in New York City and the main Continental defense forces in the Hudson Highlands. Jersey Dutch patriot and Tory troops carried on a five-year war of neighbors between the lines, while the grand armies of Britain and America maneuvered on either side of them for a chance to strike a blow at the other.
Adrian Leiby offers an exciting narrative of the people of Dutch New Jersey and New York during this conflict. Historians will find colorful details about the Revolutionary War, and genealogists will find much previously unpublished material on hundreds of men and women of Dutch New Jersey and New York in the 1700s.
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The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation in the Revolutionary War
Christian M. McBurney
Westholme Publishing, 2011
Library of Congress E241.R4M33 2011 | Dewey Decimal 973.334
The Marquis de Lafayette and the French Navy join Nathanael Green, John Sullivan, and a Continental Army to Attach a British Stronghold in New England
On July 29, 1778, a powerful French naval squadron sailed confidently to the entrance of Narragansett Bay. Its appearance commenced the first joint French and American campaign of the Revolutionary War. The new allies’ goal was to capture the British garrison at Newport, Rhode Island. With British resolve reeling from the striking patriot victory at Saratoga the previous autumn, this French and American effort might just end the war.
As the French moved into the bay, surprised British captains scuttled or burned many of their vessels rather than risk capture, resulting in the most significant loss of warships suffered by the British navy during the war. French Admiral Comte d’Estaing then turned to sea to engage the main British fleet but his ships were scattered and damaged by a huge storm. After his flagship and two other ships were attacked, d’Estaing’s squadron was taken out of the campaign. The American army under General John Sullivan, meanwhile, was stranded on a small island near Newport without the expected French naval support. When they tried to retreat off the island, British and Hessian regulars were sent to destroy Sullivan’s army; instead of a rout, a running battle ensued that lasted for more than six hours. Continentals, brimming with confidence after their training during the winter of Valley Forge, once more proved that they were an effective fighting force. While the Rhode Island Campaign ended in failure for the Americans and French, there were positive signs for the future of the alliance and the Revolution.
The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation of the Revolutionary War unravels one of the most complex and multi-faceted events of the war, one which combined land and sea strategies and featured controversial decisions on both sides. Many prominent patriots participated, including Nathanael Greene, Marquis de Lafayette, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. Most important, while the campaign’s failure led to harsh criticism of the French in some quarters, leaders such as Greene, Lafayette, and George Washington steadfastly worked to ensure that the alliance would remain intact, knowing that the next joint operation could well succeed. Relying on in-depth research from American, French, British, and German original sources, author Christian McBurney has written the most authoritative book on this fascinating episode in American history.
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Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution
William Bernard Peach, ed.
Duke University Press, 1979
Library of Congress E211.P96918 1979 | Dewey Decimal 973.31
Richard Price was a loyal, although dissenting, subject of Great Britain who thought the British treatment of their colonies as wrong, not only prudentially, financially, economically, militarily, and politically, but, above all, morally wrong. He expressed these views in his first pamphlet early in 1776. It concluded with a plea for the cessation of hostilities by Great Britain and reconciliation. Its analyses, arguments, and conclusions, however, along with its admiration for the colonists, their moral position and qualities, could hardly fail to contribute to their reluctant recognition that there was no real alternative to independence. Price found some of his views not only misunderstood but vilified by negative critics in the ensuing controversy. So he wrote a second pamphlet which was published in early 1777. He expanded his analysis of liberty, extended its application to the war with America, and greatly expanded his discussion of the economic impact upon Great Britain. After the war, in 1784, he published a third pamphlet on the importance of the American Revolution and the means of making it a benefit to the world, appending an extensive letter from the Frenchman, Turgot. Implicitly the letter regards Price as a perceptive theorist of the revolution; explicitly it identifies the problems facing the prospective new nation and expresses a wish that it will fulfill its role s the hope of the world. Selections in the appendices present a part of the pamphlet controversy and the selection of correspondence shows how seriously Price was regarded by Revolutionary leaders.
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Rise and Fight Again: The Life of Nathanael Greene
Spencer C. Tucker
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009
Library of Congress E207.G9T83 2009
Next only to Continental army commander General George Washington, Nathanael Greene was the most important American general of the War for Independence. Self-taught but extraordinarily capable, Greene won few battles. But his campaign that won the South for the revolutionary cause was the most brilliant and daring of the entire war.
In Rise and Fight Again, award-winning military historian Spencer Tucker tells the story of Greene’s rise from relative obscurity to military prominence at the tender age of thirty-two. He reveals Greene to have been a strict disciplinarian who insisted on rigorous training but was also deeply concerned for the welfare of his men. Tucker also shows that Greene was by nature a problem-solver who recognized talent and knew how to harness it effectively. Indeed, although Greene was the youngest general in his army, Washington assigned him the herculean task of serving as its quartermaster general. Greene proved so effective in this demanding assignment that in October 1780 he was given command of the Southern Department. Taking charge of a sharply depleted, dispirited force lacking all manner of military equipment and even clothing, Greene refused to be drawn into pitched battles save on favorable terms. He rebuilt the Southern army in less than a year and adopted daring tactics that defied conventional military wisdom but recaptured from British control most of the Carolinas and Georgia.
Greene has rarely been accorded his earned place in the history of the American founding, in part because of his early death in 1786, when he was just forty-three. But with Tucker’s brief but masterful biography, Greene finally gets his due.
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The Saratoga Campaign: Uncovering an Embattled Landscape
Edited by William A. Griswold and Donald W. Linebaugh
University Press of New England, 2016
Library of Congress E241.S2S268 2016 | Dewey Decimal 973.313
The battles of Saratoga proved to be a turning point in the Revolutionary War when British forces under the command of General John Burgoyne surrendered to American forces led by General Horatio Gates. The Saratoga Campaign provides a new and greatly expanded understanding of the battles of Saratoga by drawing on the work of scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines. Presenting years of research by material culture scholars, archaeologists, historians, museum curators, military experts, and geophysicists, this definitive volume explores these important Revolutionary War battles and their aftermath, adding a physical and tangible dimension to the story of the Saratoga campaign. Presenting the latest hands-on research, The Saratoga Campaign is an original and multifaceted contribution to our understanding of this critical event in America’s birth.
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The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People
Judith A. Ridner
Temple University Press, 2018
Library of Congress F160.S4R53 2018 | Dewey Decimal 974.802
The Scots Irish were one of early Pennsylvania’s largest non-English immigrant groups. They were stereotyped as frontier ruffians and Indian haters. In The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, historian Judith Ridner insists that this immigrant group was socio-economically diverse. Servants and free people, individuals and families, and political exiles and refugees from Ulster, they not only pioneered new frontier settlements, but also populated the state’s cities—Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—and its towns, such as Lancaster, Easton, and Carlisle.
Ridner provides a much-overdue synthesis and reassessment of this immigrant group, tracing a century of Scotch-Irish migration from 1720 to 1820. These men and women brought their version of Ulster to the colonies in their fierce commitments to family, community, entrepreneurship, Presbyterianism, republican politics, and higher education. The settlements they founded across the state, including many farms, businesses, meetinghouses, and colleges, ensured that Pennsylvania would be their cradle in America, and these settlements stand as powerful testaments to their legacy to the state’s history and development.
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Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814
David Curtis Skaggs
Michigan State University Press, 2001
Library of Congress F551.S53 2001 | Dewey Decimal 977.01
The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes contains twenty essays concerning not only military and naval operations, but also the political, economic, social, and cultural interactions of individuals and groups during the struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and rivers between the Ohio Valley and the Canadian Shield. Contributing scholars represent a wide variety of disciplines and institutional affiliations from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
Collectively, these important essays delineate the common thread, weaving together the series of wars for the North American heartland that stretched from 1754 to 1814. The war for the Great Lakes was not merely a sideshow in a broader, worldwide struggle for empire, independence, self-determination, and territory. Rather, it was a single war, a regional conflict waged to establish hegemony within the area, forcing interactions that divided the Great Lakes nationally and ethnically for the two centuries that followed.
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A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic
George William Van Cleve
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Library of Congress E446.V36 2010 | Dewey Decimal 973.71
After its early introduction into the English colonies in North America, slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. But increasingly during the contested politics of the early republic, abolitionists cried out that the Constitution itself was a slaveowners’ document, produced to protect and further their rights. A Slaveholders’ Union furthers this unsettling claim by demonstrating once and for all that slavery was indeed an essential part of the foundation of the nascent republic.
In this powerful book, George William Van Cleve demonstrates that the Constitution was pro-slavery in its politics, its economics, and its law. He convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than mere “political” compromises—they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would be capable of expanding into a continental empire. In order for America to become an empire on such a scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor, and the cost of their allegiance was the deliberate long-term protection of slavery by America’s leaders through the nation’s early expansion. Reconsidering the role played by the gradual abolition of slavery in the North, Van Cleve also shows that abolition there was much less progressive in its origins—and had much less influence on slavery’s expansion—than previously thought.
Deftly interweaving historical and political analyses, A Slaveholders’ Union will likely become the definitive explanation of slavery’s persistence and growth—and of its influence on American constitutional development—from the Revolutionary War through the Missouri Compromise of 1821.
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Spies in the Continental Capital: Espionage Across Pennsylvania During the American Revolution
John A. Nagy
Westholme Publishing, 2011
Library of Congress E279.N347 2011 | Dewey Decimal 973.385
The Critical Role of British, French, and American Intelligence Operations in Colonial Pennsylvania
It did not take long after the Seven Years’ War—the French and Indian War in North America—for France to return spies to America in order to determine the likelihood of regaining the territory they lost to Britain. One of the key places of French espionage was the colony of Pennsylvania since its frontier had been an important crossroads of French influence in North America. The French recognized then that there was a real possibility that the colonies would seek their independence from Britain. Against this backdrop, award-winning historian John A. Nagy begins his investigation of espionage in colonial Pennsylvania.
Philadelphia played a key role in the history of spying during the American Revolution because it was the main location for the Continental Congress, was occupied by the British Command, and then returned to Continental control. Philadelphia became a center of spies for the British and Americans—as well as double agents. George Washington was a firm believer in reliable military intelligence; after evacuating New York City, he neglected to have a spy network in place: when the British took over Philadelphia, he did not make the same mistake, and Washington was able to keep abreast of British troop strengths and intentions. Likewise, the British used the large Loyalist community around Philadelphia to assess the abilities of their Continental foes, as well as the resolve of Congress. In addition to describing techniques used by spies and specific events, such as the Major André episode, Nagy has scoured rare primary source documents to provide new and compelling information about some of the most notable agents of the war, such as Lydia Darragh, a celebrated American spy.
An important contribution to Revolutionary War history, Spies in the Continental Capital: Espionage Across Pennsylvania During the American Revolution demonstrates that intelligence operations on both sides emanating from Pennsylvania were vast, well-designed, and critical to understanding the course and outcome of the war.
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Spies, Patriots, and Traitors: American Intelligence in the Revolutionary War
Kenneth A. Daigler
Georgetown University Press, 2014
Library of Congress E279.D35 2014 | Dewey Decimal 973.385
Students and enthusiasts of American history are familiar with the Revolutionary War spies Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold, but few studies have closely examined the wider intelligence efforts that enabled the colonies to gain their independence. Spies, Patriots, and Traitors provides readers with a fascinating, well-documented, and highly readable account of American intelligence activities during the era of the Revolutionary War, from 1765 to 1783, while describing the intelligence sources and methods used and how our Founding Fathers learned and practiced their intelligence role. The author, a retired CIA officer, provides insights into these events from an intelligence professional's perspective, highlighting the tradecraft of intelligence collection, counterintelligence, and covert actions and relating how many of the principles of the era's intelligence practice are still relevant today. Daigler reveals the intelligence activities of famous personalities such as Samuel Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Nathan Hale, John Jay, and Benedict Arnold, as well as many less well-known figures. He examines the important role of intelligence in key theaters of military operations, such as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and in General Nathanael Greene's campaign in South Carolina; the role of African Americans in the era's intelligence activities; undertakings of networks such as the Culper Ring; and intelligence efforts and paramilitary actions conducted abroad. Spies, Patriots, and Traitors adds a new dimension to our understanding of the American Revolution. The book's scrutiny of the tradecraft and management of Revolutionary War intelligence activities will be of interest to students, scholars, intelligence professionals, and anyone who wants to learn more about this fascinating era of American history.
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Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution
Kacy Dowd Tillman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
Library of Congress E277.T55 2019 | Dewey Decimal 810.99287
Female loyalists occupied a nearly impossible position during the American Revolution. Unlike their male counterparts, loyalist women were effectively silenced—unable to officially align themselves with either side or avoid being persecuted for their family ties. In this book, Kacy Dowd Tillman argues that women’s letters and journals are the key to recovering these voices, as these private writings were used as vehicles for public engagement. Through a literary analysis of extensive correspondence by statesmen’s wives, Quakers, merchants, and spies, Stripped and Script offers a new definition of loyalism that accounts for disaffection, pacifism, neutralism, and loyalism-by-association. Taking up the rhetoric of violation and rape, this archive repeatedly references the real threats rebels posed to female bodies, property, friendships, and families. Through writing, these women defended themselves against violation, in part, by writing about their personal experiences while knowing that the documents themselves may be confiscated, used against them, and circulated.
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This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780-1782
John S. Pancake
University of Alabama Press, 1985
Library of Congress E263.S7P36 1985 | Dewey Decimal 973.33
An exciting and accurate portrayal of the military action in the southern colonies that led to a new American nation.
A companion to Pancake’s study of the northern campaign, 1777: The Year of the Hangman, this volume deals with the American Revolution in the Carolinas. Together, the two books constitute a complete history of the Revolutionary War.
Pancake tells a gripping story of the southern campaign, the scene of a grim and deadly guerilla war. In the savage internecine struggle, Americans fought Americans with a fierceness that appalled even a veteran like General Nathanael Greene.
"Utilizing extensive manuscript collections, John Pancake explains not why the colonists won the War of Independence, but rather why the British lost. Yorktown, he argues, was not the result of a momentary oversight by the British navy, but the final consequence of the longstanding failure of British military and political leadership." So said the Journal of Southern History when This Destructive War was first published in 1985. The Florida Historical Quarterly further opined, "Pancake has given us a well-researched and beautifully—and tightly—written book."
General readers as well as scholars and students of the American Revolution will welcome anew this classic, definitive study of the campaign in the Carolinas.
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Timothy Pickering and the American Republic
Gerard H. Clarfield
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980
Library of Congress E302.6.P5C553 | Dewey Decimal 973.40924
Timothy Pickering was an important figure in the early American republic. For more than fifty years, he was deeply entrenched in the political, military and diplomatic affairs of the young nation. He held important administrative posts during the Revolution, two cabinet posts, and served as a congressman, senator, and as a spokesman for the extremist element of New England's Federalists. Clarfield presents the first comprehensive biography of Pickering, and a critical assessment of this controversial and often intractable man.
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Turtle: David Bushnell's Revolutionary Vessel
Roy R. Manstan
Westholme Publishing, 2010
Library of Congress E207.B92M35 2010 | Dewey Decimal 973.35092
The Remarkable History and Reconstruction of the First Operational Submarine
At the onset of the American Revolution, the British expected to quell the rebellion quickly with a show of overwhelming force. In an experiment in asymmetric warfare, David Bushnell created the first submarine vessel designed specifically “for the destruction of vessels of war.” On a quiet September night in 1776, sergeant Ezra Lee maneuvered Bushnell’s strange little craft out from Manhattan and into the midst of the greatest naval fleet ever assembled in the Americas. Lee’s goal was to sink the British flagship HMS Eagle by attaching a powerful explosive to its hull. Although the mission was unsuccessful, Bushnell’s concept of submarine warfare was considered by George Washington to have been “an effort of genius.”
David Bushnell was raised in the town of Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. More than two centuries later, another Turtle would be launched into the same river within sight of Bushnell’s first forays with his vessel during the summer of 1775. Under the direction of technical arts teacher Frederic J. Frese, students at Old Saybrook High School created a working replica of Bushnell’s submarine, facilitated through an education partnership with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, where Roy R. Manstan was a mechanical engineer and Navy trained diver. With twenty-first century submariners at the helm, the Turtle replica was subjected to a series of operational tests at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut.
In Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel, the authors provide new insight into Bushnell’s “engine of devastation,” tracing the history of undersea warfare before Bushnell and the origin of the many innovations Bushnell understood would be necessary for conducting a covert submarine attack. The knowledge gained from testing the Turtle replica enabled the authors to speculate as to what America’s first submariner Ezra Lee experienced that September night and what may have caused the attack to fail.
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The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution
Steven M. Dworetz
Duke University Press, 1990
Library of Congress JC153.L87D86 1990 | Dewey Decimal 320.512097309033
In The Unvarnished Doctrine, Steven M. Dworetz addresses two critical issues in contemporary thinking on the American Revolution—the ideological character of this event, and, more specifically, the relevance of "America’s Philosopher, the Great Mr. Locke," in this experience. Recent interpretations of the American revolution, particularly those of Bailyn and Pocock, have incorporated an understanding of Locke as the moral apologist of unlimited accumulation and the original ideological crusader for the "spirit of capitalism," a view based largely on the work of theorists Leo Strauss and C. B. Macpherson. Drawing on an examination of sermons and tracts of the New England clergy, Dworetz argues that the colonists themselves did not hold this conception of Locke. Moreover, these ministers found an affinity with the principles of Locke’s theistic liberalism and derived a moral justification for revolution from those principles. The connection between Locke and colonial clergy, Dworetz maintains, constitutes a significant, radicalizing force in American revolutionary thought.
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The Urban Crucible
Gary B. NASH
Harvard University Press, 1986
Library of Congress E188.N382 1986 | Dewey Decimal 973.2
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Washington's War 1779
Benjamin Lee Huggins
Westholme Publishing, 2018
Dewey Decimal 973.335
While Attacking the Irish at Stony Point and Paulus Hook, George Washington Prepared a Bold Plan to End the War in New York City
Despite great limits of money and manpower, George Washington sought to wage an aggressive war in 1779. He launched the Sullivan–Clinton campaign against Britain’s Iroquois allies in upstate New York, and in response to British attacks up the Hudson River and against coastal Connecticut, he authorized raids on British outposts at Stony Point and Paulus Hook. But given power by Congress to plan and execute operations with the French on a continental scale, Washington planned his boldest campaign. When it appeared that the French would bring a fleet and an army to America, and supported by intelligence from his famed “Culper” spy network, the American commander proposed a joint Franco-American attack on the bastion of British power in North America—New York City—to capture its garrison. Such a blow, he hoped, would end the war in 1779.
Based on extensive primary source material, Washington’s War 1779, by historian Benjamin Lee Huggins, describes Washington’s highly detailed plans and extensive preparations for his potentially decisive Franco-American campaign to defeat the British at New York in the fall of 1779. With an emphasis on Washington's generalship in that year—from strategic and operational planning to logistics to diplomacy—and how it had evolved since the early years of the war, the book also details the other offensive operations in 1779, including the attacks in upstate New York, Stony Point, and Paulus Hook. Although the American and French defeat at Savannah, Georgia, prevented Washington from carrying out his New York offensive, Washington gained valuable experience in planning for joint operations that would help him win at Yorktown two years later.
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The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America
T. H. Breen
Harvard University Press, 2019
Library of Congress E209.B775 2019 | Dewey Decimal 973.311
T. H. Breen introduces us to the ordinary men and women who took responsibility for the course of the American revolution. Far from the actions of the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, they took the reins of power and preserved a political culture based on the rule of law, creating America’s political identity in the process.
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William Washington, American Light Dragoon: A Continental Cavalry Leader in the War of Independence
Daniel Murphy
Westholme Publishing, 2014
Library of Congress E207.W325M87 2014 | Dewey Decimal 973.3092
A Relative of George Washington, the Life and Service of One of America's Great Cavalry Leaders
William Washington began the war as a captain of Virginia Militia, was commissioned a junior officer in the Continental Infantry, and slowly rose to field command in the Continental Light Dragoons where he built one of the hardest hitting cavalry regiments to serve in the war. His chief adversary Lord Cornwallis commented, “There could be no more formidable antagonist in a charge, at the head of his cavalry, than Colonel William Washington.” Despite his connection to the commander-in-chief, he suffered his fair share of setbacks, and his relationships varied with not only his legendary cousin George, but many well-known figures of the Revolution including, Henry Lee, Casimir Pulaski, Nathanael Greene, and Daniel Morgan. Relying largely on firsthand accounts and period letters, in William Washington: American Light Dragoon: A Continental Cavalry Leader in the War of Independence, author and avid equestrian Daniel Murphy blends these primary sources with his own working knowledge of period drill, tactics, and terrain to deliver a more complete view of William Washington’s actions throughout the conflict. This perspective traces the often overlooked role of cavalry in the American Revolution and sheds new light on many pivotal battles in of the war, including Trenton, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirk’s Hill, and William Washington’s final action at Eutaw Springs.
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Year of the Hangman: George Washington's Campaign Against the Iroquois
Glenn F. Williams
Westholme Publishing, 2007
Library of Congress E233.W55 2005 | Dewey Decimal 973.41092
Winner of the 2005 Thomas Fleming Award for the Best Book in American Revolutionary War History
Finalist for the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award
After two years of fighting, Great Britain felt confident that the American rebellion would be crushed in 1777, the "Year of the Hangman." Britain devised a bold new strategy. Turning its attention to the colonial frontiers, especially those of western New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, Britain enlisted its provincial rangers, Tories, and allied warriors, principally from the Iroquois Confederacy, to wage a brutal backwoods war in support of General John Burgoyne's offensive as it swept southward from Canada in an attempt to cut the colonies in half, divert the Continental Army, and weaken its presence around British-occupied New York City and Philadelphia.
Burgoyne's defeat at Saratoga sent shock waves through the British command. But the efforts along the frontier under the direction of Sir John Johnson, Colonel John Butler, and the charismatic Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant, appeared to be impairing the American ability to conduct the war. Destroying Patriot settlements and farms across hundreds of miles of frontier, the British and Indian forces threatened to reduce Continental army enlistment, and more importantly, precious food supplies. Following the massacres at the well-established colonial settlements of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Cherry Valley, New York, the Continental Congress persuaded General George Washington to conduct a decisive offensive to end the threat once and for all. Brewing for years, the conflict between the Iroquois and colonists would now reach its deadly climax.
Charging his troops "to not merely overrun, but destroy," Washington devised a two-prong attack to exact American revenge. The largest coordinated American military action against American Indians in the war, the campaign shifted the power in the east, ending the political and military influence of the Iroquois, forcing large numbers of loyalist to flee to Canada, and sealing Britain's fateful decision to seek victory in the south. In Year of the Hangman: George Washington's Campaign Against the Iroquois, historian Glenn F. Williams recreates the riveting events surrounding the action, including the checkered story of European and Indian alliances, the bitter frontier wars, and the bloody battles of Oriskany and Newtown.
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