Originally published in 1986, this book discusses the various meanings which historians have given to the term 'American Revolution'. It can be seen as a revolutionary war of independence from Britain, but also a constitutional and ideological revolution within America. This survey firstly examines the view from Britain and the consequences of the policy of exerting closer financial control over its colonies. It then discusses the colonists' perception of British actions and their responses which were to culminate in the Declaration of Independence. It concludes by examining the continuing revolution within America after the break with England. This will be of interest to A Level and introductory undergraduate course.

Focuses on the military, political, diplomatic, and economic aspects of the War or Revolution - allowing the reader to grasp the complex web of interactions that occurred at different times throughout the war. This is a key topic in American history and on American history courses. Other books don't focus so clearly on the military aspects, in totality from a practical viewpoint.

From December 1777 through June 1778, the American Revolution achieved a remarkable turnaround. I these months the Continental Army recovered from abject demoralization at Valley Forge to achieve a stunning victory against the British at Monmouth Courthouse. This compelling history chronicles how the war began to turn-from the consequential leadership of General Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette to the experiences of the men who marched and fought in the ranks-and reexamines one of the most controversial periods of early American history.

This definitive encyclopedia, originally published in 1983 and now available as an ebook for the first time, covers the American Revolution, comes in two volumes and contains 865 entries on the war for American independence. Included are essays (ranging from 250 to 25,000 words) on major and minor battles, and biographies of military men, partisan leaders, loyalist figures and war heroes, as well as strong coverage of political and diplomatic themes. The contributors present their summaries within the context of late 20th Century historiography about the American Revolution. Every entry has been written by a subject specialist, and is accompanied by a bibliography to aid further research. Extensively illustrated with maps, the volumes also contain a chronology of events, glossary and substantial index.

Originally published in 2011, this volume publishes the letters of Jeremy Belknap and Ebenezer Hazard. The letters encompassed twenty years, from 1779 to 1798, during a time when the United States was warring against England, establishing new governments, building a national identity, exploring the hinterland, and refining an American identity in prose and verse. The letters of Hazard and Belknap tell of an age when science and religion had not yet divorced due to irreconcilable differences, when the most profound philosophy nestled comfortably next to a childlike fascination with the remarkable. The two friends explored in their epistles the nature of love, death, and piety; the best way for humans to govern themselves; matters of religious and scientific truth and the best means to arrive at it; the methods and writing of history; human credulity; and the wonders of nature.

The Revolutionary War was nearing its end in early 1783. In his Hudson Highlands stronghold, General Washington kept a wary eye on the British force in New York City, 60 miles away. His soldiers, owed months of back pay and promised pensions, chafed under martial authority. A nationalist faction in Congress seized upon this discontent to instigate the Newburgh Conspiracy, a plot by Continental Army officers to menace civil officials who opposed the Impost, a 5% tax on imports to be collected by the central government, to satisfy the nation's debts. The army--by this time a formidable force of seasoned veterans--was provoked into threatening the very liberties it had fought to defend. This book examines this last major crisis of the Revolution, when Washington stood between his men and the American people.

* Includes new maps and an expanded treatment of the War of 1812, allowing students to grasp further dimensions of the conflict and the emergence of the United States. * Broad scope and interdisciplinary approach fully contextualize the Revolution, giving readers a comprehensive view of the era. * Fourth edition has been fully revised and updated to incorporate the insights of the latest scholarship throughout.

In this innovative book, historian Matthew Crow unpacks the legal and political thought of Thomas Jefferson as a tool for thinking about constitutional transformation, settler colonialism, and race and civic identity in the era of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson's practices of reading, writing, and collecting legal history grew out of broader histories of early modern empire and political thought. As a result of the peculiar ways in which he theorized and experienced the imperial crisis and revolutionary constitutionalism, Jefferson came to understand a republican constitution as requiring a textual, material culture of law shared by citizens with the cultivated capacity to participate in such a culture. At the center of the story in Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, Crow concludes, we find legal history as a mode of organizing and governing collective memory, and as a way of instituting a particular form of legal subjectivity.

Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis-images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.

Originally published in 1967, this book is a concise and ideal study of one of the most important periods of American history and is ideal for A Level students and as an introduction for undergraduates. It discusses the social, economic and political context for Lincoln's meteoric rise and the legacy of his many achievements including the abolition of slavery.

Originally published in 1979, this was the first biography of Jonathan Potts, a prominent Pennsylvania Quaker and physician who served in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War. It was also the first study to be published since 1931 of the role of medical doctors in the northern campaigns. No detailed memoir by an army physician or surgeon has survived to document the conditions they faced. The military career of Dr. Potts, reconstructed here from source materials, including first-hand accounts by Potts and his contemporaries provides considerable information to fill this historical gap.

Originally published in 1933, and written by "America's historian", James Truslow Adams, this volume tells the story of the rise of the American nation encompassing economics, religion, social change and politics from settlement to the Civil War. Due emphasis is given to the inter-connectedness of America with Europe - both in terms of cultural heritage and political and military entanglements. Extensive in size and scope and richly illustrated with half-tones and maps these volumes balance a historical narrative with philosophical interpretation whilst touching on as many aspects of American life and history as possible.

Appeals to readers of varied interests across historical times and places. In addition to attracting students of the early-U.S. and late-Roman republics, amateur historians who enjoy connections between the classical past and modern world will find the work useful and entertaining. This work also demonstrates the continued need for connecting different fields of history, while also helping students understand their connection to the ancient past.

Appeals to readers of varied interests across historical times and places. In addition to attracting students of the early-U.S. and late-Roman republics, amateur historians who enjoy connections between the classical past and modern world will find the work useful and entertaining. This work also demonstrates the continued need for connecting different fields of history, while also helping students understand their connection to the ancient past.

Aaron Burr - Revolutionary War hero, third vice president of the United States and a controversial figure of the early republic - was tried and acquitted of treason charges in 1807, and thereafter departed for self-imposed exile in Europe, his political career in ruins. Adrift in Paris for 15 months, he led a marginal existence on the run from creditors and the courts, getting by on handouts. While other Americans in Paris enjoyed official status that insulated them from life in the capital, Burr dreamed up fruitless schemes and pawned his possessions, yet remained in high spirits, enjoying Parisian theater and cafes. He shopped, flirted, paid for sex and associated with friends old and new while gathering the resolve to return to America. Burr's Paris journal is a rare item, with only 250 unexpurgated copies printed in 1903. In it he relates his fascinating stories and describes Parisian life at the height of Napoleon's power. Drawing on Burr's journal and other sources, this book provides a self-portrait of the down-and-out Founding Father abroad.

This book consists of seven stand-alone accounts of individuals who operated as spies during the American Revolutionary War. They were not trained as covert agents, which meant they had to develop their skills and techniques on their own, often while in the midst of the enemy where discovery meant almost certain death for them, and suffering and hardship for their family and friends. Five of them spied for the American cause and two spied for the British. Not all were motivated by patriotism, and not all escaped capture, yet their often painfully gained experience benefited future operatives and operations. They all were daring, intelligent and resourceful, and each had an unusual personality. Their labours resulted in battlefield victories, thwarted enemy plots, and significantly changed the conduct of the war, yet in spite of their efforts and their riveting stories, they and their deeds have remained relatively unknown.

From the highest hill above the town of Ripley, Ohio, you can see five bends in the Ohio River. You can see the hills of northern Kentucky and the rooftops of Ripley's riverfront houses. And you can see what the abolitionist John Rankin saw from his house at the top of that hill, where for nearly forty years he placed a lantern each night to guide fugitive slaves to freedom beyond the river.

In "Beyond the River, " Ann Hagedorn tells the remarkable story of the participants in the Ripley line of the Underground Railroad, bringing to life the struggles of the men and women, black and white, who fought "the war before the war" along the Ohio River. Determined in their cause, Rankin, his family, and his fellow abolitionists -- some of them former slaves themselves -- risked their lives to guide thousands of runaways safely across the river into the free state of Ohio, even when a sensational trial in Kentucky threatened to expose the Ripley "conductors." Rankin, the leader of the Ripley line and one of the early leaders of the antislavery movement, became nationally renowned after the publication of his "Letters on American Slavery, " a collection of letters he wrote to persuade his brother in Virginia to renounce slavery.

A vivid narrative about memorable people, "Beyond the River" is an inspiring story of courage and heroism that transports us to another era and deepens our understanding of the great social movement known as the Underground Railroad.

The American South is so identified with the Civil War that people often forget that the key battles from the final years of the American Revolution were fought in Southern states. The Southern backcountry was the center of the fight for independence, but backcountry devotion to the Patriot cause was slow in coming. Decades of animosity between coastal elites and backcountry settlers who did not enjoy accurate representation in the assemblies meant a complex political and social milieu throughout this turbulent time.

The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens brings to light the world of the Southern backcountry that engendered its role in the Revolutionary War. With careful attention to political, social, and military history, Walker concentrates on the communities and events not typically covered in books on the Revolutionary War. Through government documents, autobiographies, correspondence, and diaries, The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens gives students of the Revolution an important new perspective on the role of the South in the resolution of the fighting.

In 1776, when the Continental Congress declared independence, formally severing relations with Great Britain, it immediately began to fashion new objects and ceremonies of state with which to proclaim the sovereignty of the infant republic.
In this marvelous social and cultural history of the Continental Congress, Benjamin H. Irvin describes this struggle to create a national identity during the American Revolution. The book examines the material artifacts, rituals, and festivities by which Congress endeavored not only to assert its political legitimacy and to bolster the war effort, but ultimately to exalt the United States and to win the allegiance of its inhabitants. Congress, for example, crafted an emblematic great seal, celebrated anniversaries of U.S. independence, and implemented august diplomatic protocols for the reception of foreign ministers. Yet as Irvin demonstrates, Congress could not impose its creations upon a passive American public. To the contrary, "the people out of doors"-broadly defined to include not only the working poor who rallied in the streets of Philadelphia, but all persons unrepresented in the Continental Congress, including women, loyalists, and Native Americans-vigorously contested Congress's trappings of nationhood.
Vividly narrating the progress of the Revolution in Philadelphia and the lived experiences of its inhabitants during the tumultuous war, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty sharpens our understanding of the relationship between political elites and crowds of workaday protestors as it illuminates the ways in which ideologies of gender, class, and race shaped the civic identity of the Revolutionary United States.

Originally published in 2011, this volume publishes the letters of Jeremy Belknap and Ebenezer Hazard. The letters encompassed twenty years, from 1779 to 1798, during a time when the United States was warring against England, establishing new governments, building a national identity, exploring the hinterland, and refining an American identity in prose and verse. The letters of Hazard and Belknap tell of an age when science and religion had not yet divorced due to irreconcilable differences, when the most profound philosophy nestled comfortably next to a childlike fascination with the remarkable. The two friends explored in their epistles the nature of love, death, and piety; the best way for humans to govern themselves; matters of religious and scientific truth and the best means to arrive at it; the methods and writing of history; human credulity; and the wonders of nature.

This book posits that the American Revolution - waged to form a ""more perfect union"" - still raged long after the guns went silent. Eight major fugitive slave stories of the antebellum era are described and interpreted to demonstrate how fugitive slaves and their abolitionist allies embraced Patrick Henry's motto ""Give me Liberty or Give me Death"" and the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. African Americans and white abolitionists seized upon these dramatic escapes and captures to exhort citizens to complete the Revolution by extending liberty to all Americans. Casting fugitive slaves and their slave revolt leaders as heroic figures, this book provides a broader interpretation of American Revolutionaries seeking freedom for themselves and their enslaved brethren.

This book presents profiles of sixteen individuals born and raised in countries other than America who voluntarily joined the revolutionary cause. These men were writers, soldiers, merchants, sailors, guerilla fighters, pirates, financiers, and cavalry leaders. Each profile discusses the personal experiences that influenced the volunteer leader's decision to fight for the fledgling country, the sacrifices endured for the benefit of the Revolutionary Cause, and the unique talents each contributed to the war effort. Their participation helped ensure the perpetuation of the ideals and values of the American republic.

This definitive encyclopedia, originally published in 1983 and now available as an ebook for the first time, covers the American Revolution, comes in two volumes and contains 865 entries on the war for American independence. Included are essays (ranging from 250 to 25,000 words) on major and minor battles, and biographies of military men, partisan leaders, loyalist figures and war heroes, as well as strong coverage of political and diplomatic themes. The contributors present their summaries within the context of late 20th Century historiography about the American Revolution. Every entry has been written by a subject specialist, and is accompanied by a bibliography to aid further research. Extensively illustrated with maps, the volumes also contain a chronology of events, glossary and substantial index.

This definitive encyclopedia, originally published in 1983 and now available as an ebook for the first time, covers the American Revolution, comes in two volumes and contains 865 entries on the war for American independence. Included are essays (ranging from 250 to 25,000 words) on major and minor battles, and biographies of military men, partisan leaders, loyalist figures and war heroes, as well as strong coverage of political and diplomatic themes. The contributors present their summaries within the context of late 20th Century historiography about the American Revolution. Every entry has been written by a subject specialist, and is accompanied by a bibliography to aid further research. Extensively illustrated with maps, the volumes also contain a chronology of events, glossary and substantial index.

Francis Marion is certainly the stuff of which legends are made. His nickname "The Swamp Fox," bestowed upon him by one of his fiercest enemies, captures his wily approach to battle. The embellishment of his exploits in Parson Weems' early biography make separation of fact from fiction difficult, but certainly represents the awe, loyalty, and attraction he produced in those around him. His legacy is enshrined in the fact that more places in the United States have been named after him than any other soldier of the American Revolution, with the sole exception of George Washington. Even today's U.S. Army Rangers include Marion as one of their formative heroes. Surely much about leadership can be learned from such an intriguing personality. Leading like the Swamp Fox: The Leadership Lessons of Francis Marion unlocks those lessons. Divided into three parts, the book first presents the historical background and context necessary to appreciate Marion's situation. The main body of the book then examines Marion's leadership across eight categories, with a number of vignettes demonstrating Marion's competency. The summary then captures some conclusions about how leadership impacted the American Revolution in the South Carolina Lowcountry. An appendix provides some information about how the reader might explore those physical reminders of Marion and his exploits that exist today. Readers interested in history or leadership, or both, will all find something for them in Leading like the Swamp Fox.