Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America

Scribner, Vaughn

ISBN 10: 1469680777 / ISBN 13: 9781469680774

Verlag: The University of North Carolina, 2024

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers mon0003656774

Inhaltsangabe:

The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as 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.”

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor: Vaughn Scribner is associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, ...
Verlag: The University of North Carolina
Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
Einband: paperback
Zustand: Very Good