Under Alien Skies Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America
Innbundet /
2024
/ Engelsk
Product details
ISBN
9781469680767
Published
2024-12-31
Publisher
The University of North Carolina Press
Height
232 mm
Width
155 mm
Age
G, 01
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
250
Author
Biographical note
Vaughn Scribner is associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas.
The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as the marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty, and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture, as Vaughn Scribner reveals, could not have been further from the truth. In Under Alien Skies , Scribner illustrates how foreign soldiers' negative perceptions of the American environment merged with harsh wartime realities to elicit considerable physical, mental, and emotional anguish.
Whether trudging through alligator-infested swamps, nursing a comrade back to health in a rain-sodden tent, or digging trenches in a burned-out port city, most who fought in America under the British army's flag ultimately deemed themselves strangers fighting in a strange land. For them, Revolutionary America looked nothing like the ""happy land blessed with every climate"" that Revolutionary republicans so successfully promoted. Instead, the War of Independence descended into a quagmire of anxiety, destruction, and distress at the hands of the American environment—a ""Diabolical Country,"" as one British soldier opined, ""which no Earthly Compensation can put me in Charity with.
Whether trudging through alligator-infested swamps, nursing a comrade back to health in a rain-sodden tent, or digging trenches in a burned-out port city, most who fought in America under the British army's flag ultimately deemed themselves strangers fighting in a strange land. For them, Revolutionary America looked nothing like the ""happy land blessed with every climate"" that Revolutionary republicans so successfully promoted. Instead, the War of Independence descended into a quagmire of anxiety, destruction, and distress at the hands of the American environment—a ""Diabolical Country,"" as one British soldier opined, ""which no Earthly Compensation can put me in Charity with.
Read more
The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as the marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty, and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture, as Scribner reveals, could not have been further from the truth.
Read more
Product details
ISBN
9781469680767
Published
2024-12-31
Publisher
The University of North Carolina Press
Height
232 mm
Width
155 mm
Age
G, 01
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
250
Author