“Scars of Independence” makes lookers-on of us all, forcing readers to confront the visceral realities of a conflict too often bathed in warm, nostalgic light.Ī German trained in England as a historian of the British Empire, Hoock trumpets the novelty of his angle of vision in what he calls the “first book on the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War to adopt violence as its central analytical and narrative focus.” He marshals a good deal of startling new evidence, the fruits of prodigious research in British archives too rarely used by historians of colonial America and the early United States. “I have no relish for civil Wars & there is no such thing as being a looker on,” one New Yorker wrote in 1775. As this revelatory and sometimes punishing study documents, the United States took shape not only in coffeehouses and on the pages of political pamphlets, but also on blood-soaked battlefields.
As the runaway success of “Hamilton” amply demonstrates, American audiences prefer to imagine the nation’s birth pangs as a series of dexterous verbal battles played out more or less civilly, in the proverbial rooms where it happened.
Such images more readily conjure up scenes from Srebrenica or Kigali or Mosul than from the fledgling United States some two and a quarter centuries ago. Soldiers plunder houses and rape wives and daughters, sometimes in front of their husbands and fathers, the violation of the women justified as a weapon of war, “a fortunate stroke … in mending the breed,” as one newspaper puts it. Captors shackle their prisoners in darkness, in underground chambers too small to allow them to stand. Gangs prowl the streets, armed with improvised weapons, hunting political opponents, whom they often scourge, sometimes hang and occasionally burn. SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE America’s Violent Birth By Holger Hoock Illustrated.
0 kommentar(er)
