Author: John A. Ruddiman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813936187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers’ own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington’s army and the course of the war. Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers’ perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for its independence.
Author: Michael E. Shay
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0811773523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” remains one of the enduring, and most stirring, quotations of the Revolutionary War, and it was very likely uttered at the Battle of Bunker Hill by General Israel Putnam. Despite this, and Putnam’s renown as a battlefield commander and his colorful military service far and wide, Putnam has never received his due from modern historians. In The Whites of Their Eyes, Michael E. Shay tells the exciting life of Israel Putnam. Born near Salem, Massachusetts, in 1718, Putnam relocated in 1740 to northeastern Connecticut, where he was a slaveowner and, according to folk legend, killed Connecticut’s last wolf, in a cave known as Israel Putnam Wolf Den, which is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. During the French and Indian War, Putnam enlisted as a private and rose to the rank of colonel. He served with Robert Rogers, famous Ranger founder and leader, and a popular phrase of the time said, “Rogers always sent, but Putnam led his men to action.” In 1759, Putnam led an assault on French Fort Carillon (later Ticonderoga); in 1760, he marched against Montreal; in 1762, he survived a shipwreck and yellow fever during an expedition against Cuba; and in 1763, he was sent to defend Detroit during Pontiac’s rebellion. When the Revolutionary War broke out, Putnam—who had been radicalized by the Stamp Act—was among those immediately considered for high command. Named one of the Continental Army’s first four major generals, he helped plan and lead at the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he gave the order about “the whites of their eyes” and argued in favor of fortifying Breed’s Hill, in addition to Bunker Hill. Most of the battle would take place on Breed’s. During the battles for Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island during the summer of 1776, Putnam proved himself a capable and courageous battlefield commander with a special eye for fortifications, but he sometimes faltered in tactical and strategic decision-making. In the fall of 1777, the British outmanned Putnam, resulting in the loss of several key forts in the Hudson Highlands near West Point. Putnam was exonerated by a court of inquiry, but—nearly sixty and opposed by powerful political elements from New York, including Alexander Hamilton—he spent many of the following months recruiting in Connecticut. In December 1779 he was returning to Washington’s Army to rejoin his division when he suffered a stroke and was paralyzed. The Whites of Their Eyes recounts the life and times of Israel Putnam, a larger-than-life general, a gregarious tavern keeper and farmer, who was a folk hero in Connecticut and the probable source of legendary words during the Revolutionary War—and whose exploits make him one of the most interesting officers in American military history.
Author: Virginia DeJohn Anderson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019991687X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In September 1776, two men from Connecticut each embarked on a dangerous mission. One of the men, a soldier disguised as a schoolmaster, made his way to British-controlled Manhattan and began furtively making notes and sketches to bring back to the beleaguered Continental Army general, George Washington. The other man traveled to New York to accept a captain's commission in a loyalist regiment before returning home to recruit others to join British forces. Neither man completed his mission. Both met their deaths at the end of a hangman's rope, one executed as a spy for the American cause and the other as a traitor to it. Neither Nathan Hale nor Moses Dunbar deliberately set out to be a revolutionary or a loyalist, yet both suffered the same fate. They died when there was every indication that Britain would win the American Revolution. Had that been the outcome, Dunbar, convicted of treason and since forgotten, might well be celebrated as a martyr. And Hale, caught spying on the British, would likely be remembered as a traitor, rather than a Revolutionary hero. In The Martyr and the Traitor, Virginia DeJohn Anderson offers an intertwined narrative of men from very similar backgrounds and reveals how their relationships within their families and communities became politicized as the imperial crisis with Britain erupted. She explores how these men forged their loyalties in perilous times and believed the causes for which they died to be honorable. Through their experiences, The Martyr and the Traitor illuminates the impact of the Revolution on ordinary lives and how the stories of patriots and loyalists were remembered and forgotten after independence.
Author: Richard M. Ketchum
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805060987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
In the fall of 1776 the British delivered a crushing blow, a story of the small band of soldiers held together by George Washington in the face of disaster.
Author: Lauric Henneton
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004314741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies tracks the impact of fear and responses thereto on the social and political construction of 17th- and 18th-century America.
Author: Howard Cecil Perkins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Secession
Languages : en
Pages : 628
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Book Description
Author: Kara D. Vuic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317449088
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military is the first examination of the interdisciplinary, intersecting fields of gender studies and the history of the United States military. In twenty-one original essays, the contributors tackle themes including gendering the "other," gender and war disability, gender and sexual violence, gender and American foreign relations, and veterans and soldiers in the public imagination, and lay out a chronological examination of gender and America’s wars from the American Revolution to Iraq. This important collection is essential reading for all those interested in how the military has influenced America's views and experiences of gender.
Author: Charles Patrick Neimeyer
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814757820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Neimeyer for the first time reveals who really served in the army during the Revolution and why. His conclusions are startling. The long-termed Continental soldiers were not those whom historians have traditionally associated with the defense of liberty.
Author: Simon Hornblower
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191016764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 912
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Book Description
What did the ancient Greeks eat and drink? What role did migration play? Why was emperor Nero popular with the ordinary people but less so with the upper classes? Why (according to ancient authors) was Oedipus ('with swollen foot') so called? For over 2,000 years the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome have captivated our collective imagination and provided inspiration for so many aspects of our lives, from culture, literature, drama, cinema, and television to society, education, and politics. Many of the roots of the way life is lived in the West today can be traced to the ancient civilizations, not only in politics, law, technology, philosophy, and science, but also in social and family life, language, and art. Beautiful illustrations, clear and authoritative entries, and a useful chronology and bibliography make this Companion the perfect guide for readers interested in learning more about the Graeco-Roman world. As well as providing sound information on all aspects of classical civilization such as history, politics, ethics, morals, law, society, religion, mythology, science and technology, language, literature, art, and scholarship, the entries in the Companion reflect the changing interdisciplinary aspects of classical studies, covering broad thematic subjects, such as race, nationalism, gender, ethics, and ecology, confirming the impact classical civilizations have had on the modern world.
Author: Brett Goodin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421438984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
How three white, non-elite American sailors turned their experiences of captivity into diverse career opportunities—and influenced America's physical, commercial, ideological, and diplomatic development. Winner of the John Lyman Book Award by the North American Society for Oceanic History From 1784 to 1815, hundreds of American sailors were held as "white slaves" in the North African Barbary States. In From Captives to Consuls, Brett Goodin vividly traces the lives of three of these men—Richard O'Brien, James Cathcart, and James Riley—from the Atlantic coast during the American Revolution to North Africa, from Philadelphia to the Louisiana Territories, and finally to the western frontier. This first scholarly biography of American captives in Barbary sifts through their highly curated writings to reveal how ordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances could maneuver through and contribute to nation building in early America, all the while advancing their own interests. The three subjects of this collective biography both reflected and helped refine evolving American concepts of liberty, identity, race, masculinity, and nationhood. Time and again, Goodin reveals, O'Brien, Cathcart, and Riley uncovered opportunities in their adversity. They variously found advantage first in the Revolution as privateers, then in captivity by writing bestselling captivity narratives and successfully framing their ordeal as a qualification for coveted government employment. They even used their modest fame as ex-captives to become diplomats, get elected to state legislatures, and survey the nation's territorial expansions in the South and West. Their successful self-interested pursuit of opportunities offered by the expanding American empire, Goodin argues, constitutes what he calls "the invisible hand of American nation building." Goodin shows how these ordinary men, lacking the genius of a Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Hamilton, depended on sheer luck and adaptability in their quest for financial independence and public recognition. Drawing on archival collections, newspapers, private correspondence, and government documents, From Captives to Consuls sheds new light on the significance of ordinary individuals in guiding early American ideas of science, international relations, and what it meant to be a self-made man.
