Harold E. Selesky – Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Library of Military History (Second edition)

Автор: Harold E. Selesky
Название книги: Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Second edition)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Америки, Австралии, Океании
Страницы: 1408
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

More than forty years ago, Mark Mayo Boatner, III, then a forty-four-year-old lieutenant
colonel in the United States Army, saw the need for an encyclopedia that focused on the
military aspects of the American Revolution. He completed and published the fruits of his
labor in 1966; it was an impressive achievement for one man, who distilled nearly two
centuries of scholarship on the war into a single wide-ranging yet manageable volume of
almost 1900 entries. The book immediately earned a respected place in the reference
literature on the war, and came to be so well regarded that historians of the period referred
to it simply as ‘‘Boatner.’’ Amid the many noteworthy books on the complex conflict that
gave birth to the American nation, ‘‘Boatner’’ was the premier place to go for concise,
accurate information on how the war was waged and won. Historians, of course, continued
to investigate and write about the war, often with ‘‘Boatner’’ serving as an important
reference and guide. Their efforts were spurred in part by the bicentennial events of 1975–
1983, but they were also responding to evolving priorities and changing interests in the
discipline of history. As more information on war making in colonial and revolutionary
America was uncovered, and new questions were asked of familiar material, historians began
to put together a more complete picture of what happened during the war, and understood
more about why it happened, than had previously been the case. Because the literature on
the American Revolution has burgeoned in the years since the original edition of ‘‘Boatner’’
was published, it is time to incorporate the information and new perspectives of that
scholarship into an updated work that satisfies the needs and interests of the twenty-firstcentury
reader.
The present volumes are a comprehensive revision of the original edition of Mark
Boatner’s 1966 encyclopedia. All 1700 entries in the 2006 edition have been reviewed, and
all but a small percentage have been comprehensively revised and augmented. Recent
scholarship has been incorporated into the revised entries, as well as used to produce entirely
new entries on subjects that had not been explored or contemplated forty years ago. These
new subjects include ‘‘African Americans in the Revolution,’’ ‘‘Historiography,’’
‘‘Iconography,’’ ‘‘Religion and the American Revolution,’’ ‘‘Continental Army, Social
History’’ and ‘‘Violence,’’ among others. A new cluster of entries on mobilization in the
colonies is also an original contribution to this edition. All entries are combined in a single
alphabetical sequence, the plan Boatner employed in his original encyclopedia. This second
edition is further enhanced by the addition of a thematic outline of entries, and a comprehensive
updated bibliography. The purpose of the present volumes remains what it was in 1966: to provide a handy source for concise, accurate information on the military aspects of
the American Revolution.
In addition to incorporating recent scholarship in revised and new entries, the present
volumes differ from the original ‘‘Boatner’’ in another significant way. Where the 1966
encyclopedia was the product of the perspective and hard work of one person, these volumes
are works of collective scholarship. Many historians have contributed their expertise to the
present volumes, and their passion for and knowledge of their subjects is evident throughout,
even as they write within the necessarily limited space of an encyclopedia entry. Every new
entry ends with the name of its author, and every revised entry of substantial length ends with
the name of the person who reviewed and revised it. (Shorter entries, typically definitions of
military terms, mentions of physical locations, and alternate names for things and events
known better by another name, as well as all cross references, do not carry an attribution,
although all of them have been reviewed and revised where necessary.) The revisions
undertaken to update the longer entries range widely in scope and substance. Many of
these entries, including the biographical sketches on the most important leaders and all of the
accounts of major battles and campaigns, have been rewritten in light of modern scholarship,
and thus bear little resemblance to the original entry in the 1965 volume. All entries, of
course, reflect the perspective of their authors or revisers; every effort has been made to ensure
the accuracy of the factual information contained in each entry, but the interpretations and
opinions are those of its author or reviser. Scholarship in history works that way: from the
voices of many investigators, each with its own emphasis and point of view, come, eventually,
a synthesis that allows us all to understand a bit more clearly what it was like to have lived and
fought in a war that began more than 230 years ago.
It should be noted that the two volumes of the encyclopedia are part of a trilogy with the
revised edition of Boatner’s Landmarks of the American Revolution: A Guide to Locating and
Knowing What Happened at the Sites of Independence, originally published in 1973. The
Landmarks book has been thoroughly updated in a process similar to that whereby the
encyclopedia has been revised, and provides a comprehensive companion for the reader
interested in the current state and accessibility of many of the sites mentioned in the
encyclopedia.
As in all works of collective scholarship, the person whose name is on the masthead owes
an incalculable debt to the many authors who have contributed their time and expertise to
making this final product worthy of its pedigree and able to stand the test of time. Rather
than single out a few, and thereby relegate the rest, I invite readers to thumb through the
encyclopedia, to read with purpose or at leisure, and to note the name of the person whose
words they have digested and from which they have learned a bit more about the conflict that
defined the American nation. The names of all contributors are listed alphabetically in one
group elsewhere in this front matter.
At the risk of seeming invidious, I would, however, wish to thank two individuals by
name. Stephen Wasserstein is the editor at Thomson Gale in New York who contacted me
about the possibility of updating Mark Boatner’s singular achievement. Stephen cheerfully
put up with me, offered his counsel and assistance at every turn, and fully deserves the
heartfelt thanks and appreciation I now offer him. These volumes owe their existence to him
as much, or more, than anyone else.
The actual production of the volumes was in the capable hands of the Thomson Gale
team at the company’s headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Stephen Cusack,
project editor on the history team for the Macmillan and Scribner’s imprints, was the leader
of the craftspeople who created the handsome volumes you now hold. In an age when costconsciousness
can be taken to extremes, he orchestrated a demonstration of how high quality
can still be achieved on a tight budget.
Every author—and editor, too—owes a debt of gratitude to the family members who, in
words that are as true as they are conventional, made it possible for me to undertake and complete this project. In my case, those long-suffering—and endlessly supportive—individuals
were my wife Joyce, our daughters Margaret and Caroline, and our canines Spenser,
Emily and Daphne. It is also conventional, and accurate, for the editor to accept responsibility
for whatever flaws might remain in the work. This I do so gladly, believing that it is
more important to get scholarship that stimulates thinking into the hands of the reader, even
if a few flaws remain.
OVERVIEW OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
War remains the most complex task that any society can undertake. The decision to resort to
politically sanctioned, purposeful armed violence generally arrives when a critical mass of a
society’s leaders wins the approval of enough of its politically active members so that war can
be initiated and sustained with some prospect that the society will thereby earn a favorable
outcome to whatever problem could not be resolved short of war. The decision that war is
the only, or at least the best available, means to resolve a political problem is powerfully
shaped by the character of the society. The makeup of that society, in turn, profoundly
shapes how the war is imagined and waged. The course of the war—and no war ever
resembles exactly what either side thought it would look like—exerts pressures and strains
that can come to determine the structure and development of the societies involved. It
therefore behooves us to investigate and understand how wars begin, are waged, and become
part of the fabric and memory of our society. No war can be comprehended in isolation
from the host of political, social, economic, geographic, and racial factors—to name but a
few—that form the totality of a society. But it is possible to begin one’s inquiry with the
aspects of a conflict that involve the understanding and manipulation of armed violence,
what might be called ‘‘military history.’’ As long as one remains mindful that war making is
connected in a web with everything else in society, it is intellectually possible to focus on the
armed struggle itself.
The term ‘‘American Revolution’’ encompasses far more than the military conflict
between Great Britain and its continental North American colonies between 1775 and
1783. The full story of the American Revolution begins roughly in the middle of the
eighteenth century, when the assumptions about the character and stability of the British
Empire in North America, as we can see in retrospect, were more or less shared by British
citizens living on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Over the next twenty-five years,
circumstances, decisions, and events shredded those assumptions, to the point that open
war broke out between the colonies and Britain in April 1775 and the colonies declared their
political independence in July 1776. For eight years—the longest war in the history of the
American nation until the Vietnam conflict—the men and women we know as ‘‘Patriots’’
created and used military and naval forces to defeat British attempts to re-establish the
authority of the Crown over the colonies. The military aspects of that struggle, more
accurately known as the War for American Independence, remain the focus of these volumes.
The Revolution itself continued after the end of the war, as the victors continued their efforts
to create new forms of governance that would be as widely accepted, and therefore as stable,
as the ones they had once known under the British Empire. That process included the
writing of a new federal constitution and the establishment of a working federal government,
and culminated in the peaceful transition of power from one political party to another
following the election of 1800