The social history and the military history of the Revolution have seldom come together in the past because military historians tend to regard the war as an instrument managed on each side with more or less skill, while social historians treat military operations, if at all, as incidental. . . . But if the war is restored to the central position that it had for the Revolutionary generation, and if it is seen not merely as an instrument but as a process, which entangled large numbers of people for a long period of time in experiences of remarkable intensity, then it may be possible to bring the study of the war and the study of the Revolution more closely together, to the benefit of both.

– John Shy, “The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War” (1973)

The military conflict of the American Revolution is integral to understanding the wider Revolution. I say this as a matter of fact, and I think that most people studying the American Revolution today would agree. This was not, however, always the case. As Kathleen DuVal mentions in the recent JER “The Revolution at 250 Conversation,” for much of the second half of the twentieth century, “despite claiming to be scholars of the Revolution, most spent little time on the actual Revolutionary War.”[1] It is this point that I would like to spend a little more time talking about.

In referencing the gulf between military historians and “other historians” working in the late twentieth century, DuVal cites the scholarship of John Shy.[2] For those not familiar with Shy’s work, he was an early proponent for academic military history and for connecting the wider American Revolution with the military conflict often referred to as the American War of/for Independence, or more simply, the Revolutionary War.[3] While making inroads toward these goals, in 2007 Shy concluded that “nevertheless, the overall pattern is clear; military history of the American Revolution has followed its own line, while the general historiography of the Revolution has followed a distinctly different line.”[4]

Shy’s observation is helpful in reminding us of how scholars of the Revolution have historically treated the military conflict, but it might yet be a useful question to ask ourselves today as we approach Rev250. Is the nearly eight-year period of military conflict still disconnected from wider scholarship on the American Revolution? Going into the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, it is my hope that we can finally put to bed Shy’s concern by taking the military conflict seriously, acknowledging that it was a crucial driver of wider change and revolutionary transformation, and by placing it at the center of our scholarship and our teaching.

For some of us, that might require significant change in how we approach the Revolution. But I think for most, we are well on our way to achieving these goals, thanks in large part due to some substantial developments that have occurred within the field of military history since 1976, and perhaps even more so since 2007 when Shy expressed his concerns for the state of the field.

“Panoramic view of West Point, New York showing American encampments on the Hudson River,” August 1782, by Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825). Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004678934/
L’Efant’s painting is filled with elements of the military conflict. One can see veteran soldiers – their faces raceless – from New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Southern states at the peak of the Continental Army’s martial proficiency (perhaps Deborah Sampson among them); sick and convalescents recovering from smallpox and other camp diseases; women camp followers who played crucial roles in the army and structured its community; a wagon supply train needed to keep the army alive winding through a makeshift road-system; a neat and orderly cantonment of tents, huts, and barracks; military fortifications built by the Army with assistance from imprisoned Loyalists (white and black) and local civilian artisans and laborers (free and enslaved); a giant chain blocking the Hudson River forged by a nascent American manufacturing industry; and of course, the Hudson River itself, that crucial transportation artery long associated with traditional studies of military strategy.

Since 1976, multiple generations of scholars helped stretch the bounds of what traditionally was understood as “military history.”^[5] In what started with the lively debates over the “Military Revolution” —drawing in scholars from across the historical discipline—emerged the “new military history” and associated “war and society” approach.^[6] Many of these works have addressed what Shy highlighted in 1973 as “the neglected questions of the war’s impact on society” that left “a large slice of revolutionary life . . . overlooked.”^[7] This includes studies on violence and upheaval; the magnitude and experience of Loyalism; mobilization and politicization; democratization of politics; the logistical requirements of armies; the impact on state formation; local histories of daily routine and disruption on the home front; how normal governmental organization was upended and old authorities displaced; and how social groups and individuals were (or were not) touched by the war, to include women, free and enslaved Blacks, and Native Americans.^[8]

These “new” approaches helped foster diverse areas of study conducted by higher-ed academics, public historians, contingent faculty, high school educators, independent scholars, graduate students, and living history and material culture enthusiasts, all interested in questions related to the military history of the American Revolution. It especially took off, however, in the last two decades thanks in large part to scholars who, while not necessarily considering themselves to be military historians, have nevertheless been doing military history, and they have been doing it as Shy encouraged by combining elements of military history with fields ranging from social, cultural, and gender and women’s history, to name just a few.^[9]

My own work is representative of these developments, engaging with the convergence of military and social history. In examining the everyday experience of governance in a host of localities across the colony-turned-state of New York, the American War for Independence lies at the center of my book project (literally and figuratively). In recovering the day-to-day activities of governance and efforts by the state to increase its regulatory strength and administrative capacity to secure compliance with central directives, the war’s impact looms large. The nearly eight years of armed struggle unequivocally shaped the type of state that formed in New York. Figuring out how the military conflict affected that process, has been one of my central objectives, for independence without war would have resulted in a very different trajectory of state formation. And this might be highlighted for the entire nation: Independence without a war would have resulted in a very different United States.

This brings me to my final point: that there remains a wealth of material and lines of inquiry waiting for current and future scholars who study the American Revolution, and the military conflict is an ideal place to focus.[10] For a field and profession struggling against collapse and facing public indifference in-part caused by our “inability . . . to communicate effectively with the American people,” there remains a significant reading (and listening and viewing) public that is eager to consume military history.[11] Meeting that public where their interests lie might be an opportunity to start a wider conversation on the Revolution and the need for financial resources and institutional support necessary to facilitate new scholarship on it. To do so, we should look to the military conflict at the center of the American Revolution.

Endnotes

[1] Quote from T. H. Breen, Kathleen DuVal, Leslie M. Harris, Michael D. Hattem, and Serena Zabin, “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” Journal of the Early Republic 44 (Winter 2024), 513–79.

[2] DuVal, “The Revolution at 250,” 532.

[3] John Shy, “The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Essays on the American Revolution , ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill, NC, 1973), 121–56; more broadly, see John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1990).

[4] John Shy, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” in War & Society in the American Revolution, ed. John Resch and Walter Sargent (DeKalb, IL, 2007), 4.

[5] Perhaps the most important development has been the wide-ranging debates over the “Military Revolution” in early modern Europe, which played a crucial role in establishing academic military history in the United States and bringing military history to the attention of a much wider historical community, to include those working on economic, political, social, and gender history. For an overview of the Military Revolution, see the introduction in Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO,, 1995), 1–10.

[6] Don Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, SC, , 1988), 241–59; Wayne E. Lee, “Mind and Matter—Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field,” Journal of American History 93  (Mar, 2007), 1116–42; Robert M. Citino, “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” American Historical Review 112 (Oct. 2007), 1070–90. As an illustrative example of this approach related to the American Revolution, see Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (Columbia, SC, 1996).

[7] Shy, “The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” 217.

[8] The scholarship within the last fifteen to twenty years alone is extensive. The following edited volumes provide a glimpse of some of the trends and breadth of work on aspects of the military conflict: John Resch and Walter Sargent, eds., War & Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts (DeKalb, IL, 2007); Glenn A. Moots and Phillip Hamilton, ed., Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War of Independence (Norman, OK, 2018); Holly A Mayer, ed. Women Waging War in the American Revolution (Charlottesville, VA, 2022).

[9] Representative of this group are my fellow Panorama contributors Lauren Duval and Rachel Engl. Duval describes her forthcoming book—The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence—as sitting at the intersection of gender history and military history. Engl describes her project – building on her dissertation titled “America’s First Band of Brothers: Friendship & Camaraderie within the Continental Army during the Revolutionary Era,” PhD diss. (Lehigh University, 2019—as a study examining the communities created within a military environment, but doing so with the lens of a social or cultural historian. As Mark Boonshoft reminds me, there are also a substantial number of works that while not intrinsically about the military conflict of the Revolution, their authors use the war to bound their studies. Examples range from Rob Parkinson’s The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016) to Aaron Sullivan’s The Disaffected: Britain’s Occupation of Philadelphia during the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 2019).

[10] Housed in a host of local historical societies, county archives, larger private and state institutions, and even the Library of Congress and National Archives, manuscript materials on the conflict sit little explored or in some cases never touched. Others that have been used retain a host of untold experiences from the war, including massive volumes of digitized transcribed collections. As Nora Slonimsky, Mark Boonshoft, and Ben Wright note in the introduction of their open access edited volume American Revolutions in the Digital Age (Ithaca, NY, 2024), “Early American history is one of the most digitized historical subfields,” with more digitization projects currently underway. For a sampling of digitally available materials, see the list compiled by Terry Bouton: https://terrybouton.wordpress.com/revolutionsourcesonline/. For some projects currently being digitized, see the National Archives “Revolutionary War Pension Files Transcription” project, https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/missions/revolutionary-war-pension-files and the University of Michigan, William L. Clements Library digitization projects for the Thomas Gage Papers, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/gage/#contents, and the Henry Clinton Papers, https://clements.umich.edu/item/conservation-of-the-henry-clinton-papers-1736-1850-volumes-17-19/. Lastly, being at the Naval Academy, I would be remiss not to mention the ongoing work with which my colleague Abby Mullen is involved, editing and digitizing the Naval Documents of the American Revolution. These currently consist of 13 volumes containing more than 16,000 pages of materials,https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publications-by-subject/naval-documents-of-the-american-revolution.html.

[11] Quote from T. H. Breen, “The Revolution at 250,” 566. On the broader challenges facing the field, see Erin Bartram, “A Profession, If You Can Keep It,” Contingent Magazine (Jan. 7, 2023), https://contingentmagazine.org/2023/01/07/a-profession-if-you-can-keep-it/; Asheesh Kapur Siddique, “Does Humanities Research Still Matter?” Inside Higher Ed (Aug. 15, 2023),  https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/08/15/does-humanities-research-matter-anymore-opinion.