Sybil Ludington, the Female Paul Revere: The Making of a Revolutionary War Heroine

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-222
Author(s):  
Paula D. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The Past

Sybil Ludington, “the female Paul Revere,” has proven to be a remarkably protean figure in the memory of and contestation over the American Revolution. Her place in history has shifted in response to changing currents in culture and politics, demonstrating the ways in which the past is made and remade to satisfy contemporary audiences.

Writing the American Revolution: War Veterans in the Nineteenth-Century Cultural Memory

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWARD TANG
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
The Past ◽  
Bunker Hill ◽  
Israel Potter

With how little cooperation of the societies after all is the past remembered – At first history had no muse – but a kind fate watched over her – some garrulous old man with tenacious memory told it to his child.Henry David Thoreau,Journals (1842)In 1823, something of the bittersweet occurred in Cranston, Rhode Island: an aged revolutionary war veteran returned to his hometown after a prolonged exile in England. Hopeful about reuniting with his family and community after an absence of nearly fifty years, the old soldier was surprised and disappointed to learn that his property had been sold, his family had moved west, and few among the remaining villagers even remembered who he was. Such is the story of one Israel Potter. An adventurous fellow, he had fought at the battle near Bunker Hill, had met Benjamin Franklin, and, after being captured by the British, had roamed England after the war, continually poverty-stricken, while searching for a passage back to America. Once returned to Cranston, he applied for a federal pension for his wartime services. In all probability, Potter never received any financial compensation, but he left a narrative of his life, reminding his readers that at one point in the republic's history, he did matter.

Congress and the Future

1945 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-141
Author(s):  
Jerry Voorhis
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
Continental Congress ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legislative Body ◽  
The People ◽  
The Government ◽  
Set Up ◽  
American Nation

The American nation was born of the struggle between colonial legislatures elected by the people as their direct representatives and the executive power of the English king. It was to the colonial legislatures that the people of the Colonies looked for the defense of their liberties, and it was from their membership that most of the outstanding leaders of the American Revolution came. The Declaration of Independence was the work of the Continental Congress, an essentially legislative body, and until the formation of the Constitution the government of the American Republic consisted of that legislative body and of it alone. The deepest concern of the majority of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, as well as of the people whom they represented, was that the Constitution might set up toe strong an executive. They feared that such an executive might, as executives had done so frequently in the past, rob the people of their liberties and take unto himself powers inconsistent with the ideals for which the Revolutionary War had been fought.

The Mayhew Controversy

1936 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-255
Author(s):  
Richard James Hooker
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Complicated Pattern

Somewhere in the complicated pattern of colonial fears that were aroused by legislation, actual or proposed, during the fifteen years preceding the American Revolution, an indeterminate space must be found for the so-called Mayhew Controversy. Coming into the open in 1763, this anti-Anglican outbreak drew its life from roots which stretched profusely into the past. This study aims not only to describe the various sources of the controversy, but also to point out several of its more interesting characteristics.

History as Natural History

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Worster
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Forest Succession ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Ecological Succession ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
The Past ◽  
Westward Movement ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Way

Forty years ago a wise, visionary man, the Wisconsin wildlife biologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, called for “an ecological interpretation of history,” by which he meant using the ideas and research of the emerging field of ecology to help explain why the past developed the way it did. At that time ecology was still in its scientific infancy, but its promise was bright and the need for its insights was beginning to be apparent to a growing number of leaders in science, politics, and society. It has taken a while for historians to heed Leopold’s advice, but at last the field of environmental history has begun to take shape and its practitioners are trying to build on his initiative. Leopold’s own suggestion of how an ecologically informed history might proceed had to do with the frontier lands of Kentucky, pivotal in the westward movement of the nation. In the period of the revolutionary war it was uncertain who would possess and control those lands: the native Indians, the French or English empires, or the colonial settlers? And then rather quickly the struggle was resolved in favor of the Americans, who brought along their plows and livestock to take possession. It was more than their prowess as fighters, their determination as conquerors, or their virtue in the eyes of God that allowed those agricultural settlers to win the competition; the land itself had something to contribute to their success. Leopold pointed out that growing along the Kentucky bottomlands, the places most accessible to newcomers, were formidable canebrakes, where the canes rose as high as fifteen feet and posed an insuperable barrier to the plow. But fortunately for the Americans, when the cane was burned or grazed out, the magic of bluegrass sprouted in its place. Grass replaced cane in what ecologists call the pattern of secondary ecological succession, which occurs when vegetation is disturbed but the soil is not destroyed, as when a fire sweeps across a prairie or a hurricane levels a forest; succession refers to the fact that a new assortment of species enters and replaces what was there before.

Why the Fight against Hunger Mattered

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Rachel B. Herrmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Food Aid ◽  
British Colonies

This introductory chapter discusses the important role of hunger during the American Revolution. Enduring, ignoring, creating, and preventing hunger were all ways to exercise power during the American Revolution. Hunger prompted violence and forged ties; it was a weapon of war and a tool of diplomacy. In North America, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Miami, and Shawnee Indians grew and destroyed foodstuffs during the Revolutionary War, which forced their British and American allies to hunger with them, and to furnish provisions that accommodated Native tastes. By the 1810s, the United States had learned how to prevent Indian hunger, to weaponize food aid, and to deny Indians the power gained by enduring and ignoring scarcity. Meanwhile, people of African descent gained some power by creating white hunger during the Revolutionary War, but more so as formerly enslaved communities, primarily after leaving the new United States and migrating to British colonies in Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone. After white officials in Sierra Leone realized that colonists' hunger-prevention efforts gave them too much freedom, black colonists lost their hunger-preventing rights. Ultimately, three key behaviors changed and were, in turn, changed by evolving ideas about hunger: food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism.

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