The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution - Hardcover

ANDERSON

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199916861 ISBN 13: 9780199916863

Verlag: Academic, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Two men from Connecticut, each embarked on a dangerous mission, slipped onto Long Island in September 1776. Only a few weeks earlier, British forces had routed the Continental Army and taken control of New York City. The future of the infant American republic, barely two months old, looked bleak. One of the men, a soldier disguised as a schoolmaster, made his way to the British fortifications on Manhattan and began furtively taking notes and making sketches to bring back to the beleaguered American general, George Washington. The second visitor had quite different plans. He had come to Long Island to accept a captain's commission in a loyalist regiment, an undertaking that obligated him to return to Connecticut and recruit more farmers to join the King's forces. As events turned out, neither man completed his mission. Instead, each met his death 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.

In this book, Virginia Anderson traces the lives of these two men, Nathan Hale and Moses Dunbar, to explore how middle-class men made decisions on a daily basis amidst the uncertainties of war that determined not just their own fates but also the ways in which they have been remembered or forgotten in history. Hale uttered a line that has become famous ("I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country") and, after being captured and executed as a spy by the British, and the Americans winning the war, has been memorialized as a martyr to the Revolutionary cause. His life is neatly contrasted with Dunbar, a Loyalist who was captured and sentenced to death by the Connecticut Assembly. This braided narrative, intertwining the lives of Hale and Dunbar, offers a poignant snapshot of the political loyalties men forge in momentous times, how their families shaped and reacted to those decisions, and how difficult it is to judge individuals' decisionmaking in wartime without the benefit of hi[...]

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Críticas

Groundbreaking and relevant....Anderson's work is a microhistory of two individuals with a highly engaging biographical narrative that shows how social networks, circumstances, and localized concerns influenced loyalties and decisions....Highly engaging, eloquent, and convincing, the narrative at once further complicates and yet clarifies how the Revolution played out on a localized scale....Anderson presents sophisticated scholarship in an inviting manner and really opens up the world of Hale and Dunbar to the reader along with the crucial reminder that American independence was not a foregone conclusion and how easily things could have been different....A page turner. (Kelly Mielke, Journal of the American Revolution)

Biografía del autor

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, and American Journey: A History of the United States.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Academic
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199916861
• ISBN 13: 9780199916863
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288