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-- a panel of historians looks at various aspects of the revolutionary war-era military. topics include george washington's and how historians use a soldier's personal memoirs or journals. by the society for historians of the early american republic. >> i want to welcome you. have for very young historians today, so i feel a generation or two beyond. i will introduce them in a moment. before i do, a word or two on why we are actually here. all of our historians are specialists on the american revolution with a particular interest in its military aspects.

as you learn from listening to them, their approaches for the for independence very considerably. there is no microphone here. we will hear remarks about gender, personal narratives, the influence of revolutionary statery service and formation. it, i think our panelists are going to illustrate the central point of all military history and that is the field encompasses virtually all perspectives historians can bring to bear. military organizations, by their interact with, reflect, and influence the eras from which

american and the revolution was no different. what we will see today or what we will here today is how much new scholarship and new directions can teach us about the war that has gripped historians for two and a half centuries. this is the so-called new military history, a point to which i will return later, as applied to the struggle and dependents. so, now we meet our panelists. we will take the order we will .ear from them they will take 5, 10 minutes to talk about the nature of the work and then we will open the floor for discussion, which i will try to keep rolling. first, dr. lindsay trayvon ski ravinsky.

she is white house historian at the white house historical association. her focus is military service during the revolution as a precursor to senior political leadership in the new republic. :er new book, "the cabinet george washington and the creation of an american is due out next year from harvard university press and we certainly look forward to that. duval got her phd from american university and is currently an assistant professor ofhistory at the university oklahoma. her interest in gender roles during the war for independence has led to a forthcoming volume experienceehold under british occupation in charleston, south carolina. the book will be one of the first truly detailed look set domestic institutions while under military occupation.

richard angle is a doctoral candidate at lehigh university and currently teaches at the university of pennsylvania. she is looking at the history of this is central to her dissertation, america's first band of brothers: ship and come robbery during -- friendship and camaraderie during the american revolution. ar next speaker has had number of teaching and fellowships throughout his career. his forthcoming work looks at the economic aspects of the revolution and is now the assistant editor of the papers of george washington. he's a little different from the rest of the editorial team. they are posted at uva.

dan is not. he has an office at the fred w. national library for the study of george washington at mount vernon. this point -- and look. aose of you who have had chance to review the program, there was going to be a fifth panelists -- for those of you herrera ricardo "rick" does she could not make it. he may have gotten caught in one of the storms. he will be missed. he's a particularly fine scholar. i say that because he gave me a -- dustst gasket quote jacket quote a few years ago. i will give each of the panelists five or 10 minutes to talk about their work and how it relates to our panel theme "new directions in military history."

i will pose a number of questions. i have four ready to go and i suppose others will pop up as we go along. as we go along, you should feel and askraise a hand questions of your own. please wait for the microphone. the microphone will be on a boom will bringthe crew it over so you can get your start him on c-span. all rights. we will start for my left, go down the table. and we will start with lindsay. the floor is yours. i will sit down for a moment. you so much. thank you everyone for being here. i know that there is stiff competition. i know i speak for everyone when i say that we are grateful you are here and i hope you will

participate in a robust conversation. i think that is what makes roundtables fun. i hope you agree. i like to jump right to the end of the revolutionary war. a generation of soldiers and officers went home and very few of them stayed there for long. they held their positions in state governments. they held decisions in the confederation congress. they worked for reforms. for additional whatehensive reforms when they were trying for at the state level was not sufficient. looking at the numbers it is particularly illustrative of the participation of the army in these efforts. for example, the annapolis sent out a newch

invitation for another conviction -- convention, seven of 10 delegates had served in the military. similar number of delegates at the constitutional convention in philadelphia. all 55 delegates that gathered, 29 of them had served in the military. rallied for had their state conventions as well. we will again see a similar level of numerical service that i think is really helpful as we are talking about these abstract themes. the first federal congress, 29 individuals served in the senate , and 15 of those 29 had been in the military. in the house of the

52 ad military, service. in the cabinet, which tends to be focus, the secretary of war, the attorney general had all -- three of the four first secretaries had been in the army of washington. wereue that these officers informed and motivated by a unique form of nationalism that was forged during the battle of the revolution. singleeferred a powerful executive and they supported a standing army which differed from other federalists who supported concentrated power, but distrusted the army for its tradition in the british way of tradition. many have looked at the

nationalism that emerged in the 1780's, but few people have considered how that military service affected people once they got into office. produced a silo weighing that ends up being revolution, new republic.and and if we want to understand how people's motivations and ideology shape her behavior while in office, we have to look at where their formative experience takes place. i bring these examples into the cabinet. i look at how the councils of war are very importance as they institution.ew and i look forward to exploring how the councils of war may have

affected state government's in congress and other bodies beyond the and i would encourage others to do so as well, to take that military perspective. though our military seems to be a completely civilian one, i would argue military culture was really formative in the early years of the early republic and so, i am very much looking forward to our conversation. thank you for being here. i will welcome your questions once we are all done. dr. duval. history has really pushed us for a more expansive definition of what is worth it, right? underk looks at cities

occupation, under british rule. it has actually been overlooked in military histories. armies really disrupted urban environments and routines. civilian inhabitants -- they really taxed the resources of these cities. streets.crowded the cities, encamped in the in confiscated churches. soldiers were a constant presence and female civilians

faced new and immediate dangers. there had been threatened victims of robbery and plunder. wood wasmade of capable of being torn down for kindling. occupation really brought the war into the homes of american civilians and it presented more broadly a challenge in revolutionary america that men would rule over their households. i really analyzed the household side of comfort, not only between soldiers and civilians, but various genders and i argue that occupation is really crucial for understanding the civilian wartime experience. it reveals how the household was

the center of emotional ties and power relations. and as we take more seriously the disorder that occupation rot on american households, there is a new historic understanding of what was it stake in this conflict. there's not really a vibrant scholarship on other wars. but it remains pretty underexplored for the american revolution. returning to the occupation of the american revolution, there's a new understanding. by this, i mean not only women's experiences, but also the relation of power for people

both free and in slaves. short, it happens to families. it happens to men and women and exploring the revolution through reallysehold can illuminate these gender dynamics. it can show us philadelphia where a man worries about his wife's decision to quarter british soldiers in their house, even though elizabeth had the situation well in hand. it sheds light on experiences of men in charleston. who createorganizers a ball for charleston officers. and it is how they take advantage of a distracted

household to better their station in life. they were sent off with kitchen tongs and other kitchen implements. civilians encountered british forces in their homes and experienced war through the lens domestic concerns. war permeated society and a fundamentally altered the way that men and women coexisted in their households. so i gendered approach to history and revolution really shifts the perspective on this conflict, particularly between civilians and the military. we have to consider the other places that war takes place. focus more fully on civilians and what their place is in the history of the war of

the american revolution. it has these gender dynamics and how they intersect other reallyctions of power -- highlight these dynamics and vital and essential ways that we can reshape consequences. engle.el >> great. thank you, lindsay, for organizing this. thank you to everyone for coming. john adams sent a letter to the editor of the weekly register. anthe letter, adams provided answer to the fundamental question that we, as scholars, and will likely debate in a few minutes. what do we mean by the american revolution? he said the revolution was affected before the war

commenced. moreover he compellingly argued the revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, which he believed was illustrated through a change in their religious sentiments, their duties, and their obligations. above all, adams thought "this radical change in opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real revolution." seemingly -- adams' seemingly prophetic statement was a change in emotion. has recently attracted the attention of scholars. after compelling work by many all of to get understanding of the way emotions have persuaded individuals to make decisions

during the war. practitioners of the history of emotions find much material to work with them especially for ofiod -- the period of the revolutionary war. historians can develop fresh interpretations of enduring questions as well as reveal individual perspectives, masked documentarytional evidence. in other words, focusing on , we can enrich our understanding of the legacy of the american revolution and how individuals responded to the transformations of this time. in my view, applying the is proof of the

lived experience. many members of the army first experience together how to interact with a group of diverse individuals. distinctive,this but in a predominately homosexuals days, the eggs. some poor celebrated emotions such as fear, friendship, and competition. as i argue in my research, it removes from individuals the opportunity and the necessity to create relationships. they created patterns and rituals that simplifies what it part of the army.

with the research on friendship and men, not only drove revolutionary rhetoric, but was critical to defining revolutionary relationships. it offers a starting point to understand how participants on the ground of revolutionary movements throughout the became entangled in the process of social hierarchies. i believe that scholars often overlook how the environment served as an important nexus in the process of implementing change. overall, examining the american a promisingers

opportunity to unlock the key of a fundamental para lockstep .esist in the age of revolution how social revolutions were created and justified throughout war. today, i look for to our discussion. we are in the midst of something great in military history, that embraces innovation and creativity. thank you. thank you, ms. engl. mark.nk you, goes back to my time editing washington's papers

turned the revolutionary war. you're really are with washington post via's papers as a resource, in many cases we are looking for very extensive detail that we can find to illuminate the content -- you find in a documentary edition to brings of the day together the bigger picture, the larger life. excuse me. the documentary record on which we all depend. part of this, a source we have relied on for many years is the journals of individual soldiers, officers. sometimes it's the journal of , in the coursees of their service on a daily basis.

broadera little bit lives of these people. one resource everyone is aware of is travel diaries. , i get this descriptive level description of things that perhaps do not generally come out in the written records of in this case, the 18th century. some of these diaries, some of these journals, they are very first terms of when they any of these journals werens transcribed and published 100 years ago or more. it seems like in some ways they have been forgotten to a certain

extent among the sources available to historians for the they are do or ,ccasionally referenced briefly based on a reference noticed in another second dori -- secondary source that is relevant to the larger topic that you as a historian are working on. that is not a knock. you can use other people's work to track down sources. i am making a plea for looking at these sources as whole narratives and the perspectives of the individuals involved. rachel just reference the work knott.h in thes a lot there intimacy of the information involved, a person positive thoughts, the things they were thinking about in a careful way.

sometimes they are base reactions to the people and events they encountered, which can be uncomfortable to the 21st century reader, uncomfortable or amusing. the things that people talk about in these travel narratives are of course incredibly relevant to us in the work that historians do in terms of race and class and gender and a lot theopics that have become foundation of scholarship of the euro over the last few decades in between the time that these accounts were originally published. i think there is a value to be had in looking back at these which mayurces, sometimes not seem particularly

of aant, the diary european aristocrat who served in a battle in the american revolution seems particularly focus perhaps in his description war,litary aspects of the of battlefield history, but in fact these people tended to be interested in much bigger -- or ,uch more general questions events, things at the time. the development of ideas about what the revolution was about, about what revolutionary -- what was the purpose of the fight they were undertaking, what it meant to be an aristocrat fighting for the cause of liberty during the course of the war, what it meant to interact with the civilian , what was your

responsibility to protect people who were not perhaps your own people in the sense of if you germanfrench soldier or soldier serving in america. your allies with the americans, but perhaps historically you have been an enemy of these people but now you are seeing the many different context for the first time in some ways as allies and as people you're supposed to protect and you are responsible for. sense -- getting a sense as you look at the broader history of the revolutionary era what it meant for these people the revolution and the people involved and the idea that they were presumably ,ighting for and to take those

to take those ideas and those values back with them where they came from and make them part of the broader age of revolutions, as historians have come to think of it over the past couple of decades. is -- seems very relevant to what lauren and rachel and lindsay have talked about. i do not know, as an open disk -- as an open discussion question, how we bring those whole narratives back into the historical record in a useful context thates the they provide as historical texts on their own, but also brings in scholarship that has been published over the last several decades and the new many volumes

of new information, new evidence we have uncovered as historians over the years. i think making an effort to do that is a valuable potential new direction for revolutionary history to go in. >> thank you. this will begin our q&a session. as moderator, i get first crack. the questions i will ask are going to be very general. it is difficult to hone in specifically because the perspectives represented in our panel are so different. let's see if we can't get them to respond to a couple of very general questions. you should feel free to get in on this. the first thing i will notice is that all of the presentations we have just heard deal with military history from perspectives that, frankly, are fairly far from the battlefield. and lookingime ago

at the so-called new military that historian dennis showalter noticed he battlefield was disappearing from the narrative. he remarked that military historians who ignore the ,ighting, the actual combat might be considered analogous to historians of science who ignore the laws of newton or political historians who ignore the the actual conduct of the elections. i will ask our panelists to comment on how their particular work intersects with what went on on the battlefield itself. if i'm going to mirrors our panelists, i guess i pick at random -- embarrass our panelists, i guess i pick at random. go ahead, lauren. absolutely battles are important. work, it is important

context to understand the experiences that troops are bringing to these when they interact with civilians, what is happening in the broader war and the strategy that is playing outcome a why the british army is in these cities. it alsoalso argue that takes place off the battlefield to people who are not soldiers. in my own work, looking at occupation, i see it as a place where the battlefront and the home front merge. these are people who are encountering more on their doorsteps. not two enemies fighting each other, but it is these contending forces that is part of the wartime experience. i would say to open up the narrative of who we consider relevant and military history we might need to shift what we consider to be part of that battle experience. >> i will jump on that as well.

battle is a factor into my work a lot in ways that one may not expect. in particular, council of strategies and battle strategies become strategies. the way that washington organized his councils of war, sending out questions ahead of time to serve as an agenda, having the officers duked it out over what their opinions were and then writing written opinions afterwards to make sure that he got every perspective and that some of the quieter people were not totally dominated by the louder personalities and allowing him to make decisions in a slower way where the exact same things he did once he was in the cabinet. that is the first piece. the second piece i argue is differentulture is than diplomatic culture. people who were used to battle reacted differently to that

strategy than people who were used to foreign courts. washington really liked for his advisors to argue. he liked for them to debate. contest their opinions. hamilton was used to that concept. he thrived in it. jefferson, who had spent many years in france being a diplomat, and hated it. a personalitys thing, but it is also what they are used to. our -- i argue that the culture of the battlefield very much influences the culture of the cabinet and who works in that situation and who does not. , just not battles necessarily in the way one might expect. >> i am happy to comment on it. my research definitely looks

to aobviously at battles certain extent. i am looking at the relationships between these two -- between these men, which happens in the battlefield and cap and on the march. it is driven by what the men themselves are talking about and they are not necessarily commenting on that. what they are commenting on is instead how many miles they have walked in a day, all those personal accounts that dana was referring to, or they are talking about their misadventures or adventures within camp. especially for the pension written those records 40, 50 years after the war, what they are remembering is not the battles they fought in. they are remembering their time spent together with other men. that is what i think is important to keep in mind. is the experience happening on the ground and

writing about battles comes after. to endorse that point, one thing i have learned working on the revolutionary war, there is not a single battle that takes place during the course of washington's time in those few months -- so much of the history of the war itself is about what it takes to keep an army in the field. it is about supplies. it is about marching. it is about locations. canof those things illuminate a lot of things, which is not to say that the people themselves are not themselves interested in warfare or infighting or in the history of warfare. they do think about these things, but there is a lot of other things going on that are really important to the course of events that do not involve

engagement between armed forces. moments i think can tell us a lot about the period and about the way war is conducted and the eventual outcome of those battles, which are predicated on a lot of non-fighting things that happen between them. the fact that wars are not necessarily won by combat but by administrative -- all the back-office kind of stuff that keeps armies in the field. anybody else want to ring in on this? professor jones. why don't you stand up? the boom is coming around.

do try to sound intelligent. [laughter] >> excellent. i am cole jones. i teach history at purdue university. my question when i was listing to this great panel -- allow me to express my enthusiasm for the panel and for these new directions of reading vitality into the field. , we havelistening moved beyond the battlefield. that is great. multifaceted how the revolutionary war really was , how it reached into every corner of the continent. i applaud that work. i am wondering if -- none of your answers satisfied me. i am wondering if these new directions, these new dimensions, these new methodologies, gender history,

,pace, history of emotions political culture, statecraft -- if these new, exciting methodologies can be productively applied to the study of combat, the experience of combat. we talk a lot about battles, but battles ranged from a brief skirmish between a handful of militia in the woods two centuries firing on each other to the battle of monmouth. a massive army level campaign operation. could we use these methods to profitably understand the experience of combat during the revolution? siege, charleston under -- what was that like? what if we applied space and gender to thinking about that? just one example. could you get back into that. thank you so much. will go first. i would say yes, absolutely.

on the list of things i eventually want to write is a book that looks at the councils of war as an institution because i think that there is a lots of great scholarship that includes councils of war as they are discussing a particular battle or particular campaign. those are incredibly useful. i have relied on them heavily. no one, to my knowledge, has said let's look at all of them and what were their similarities and treating them as an advisory body, which was inherited from the british. at some point, i would like to write that book. andink would be worthwhile applying that to this massive institution. >> there are some good pieces of

scholarship dealing with individual councils of war, but there is no overview. sharpen the pencil on that. you are right. a lot of these methodologies -- charlston is a great one. some people were coming in to help fight. you have people -- slave labor. there is a lot of race and gender stuff happening in combat at that moment, this moment of warfare. there is a lot of opportunity is there for people who can afford that. i am a gender historian, so i i am interested in pushing the narrative beyond the battlefield combat. i am interested in moving beyond -- how do the rest of society experience war?

battle and combat fits into that. this is a little outside the scope of where my project is interested in but i think it is a fruitful avenue for someone else to study. >> with my work especially, it is important to understand the psychological trauma and experience of combat met whether -- the whole experience. i have had soldiers who never experienced battle. i had soldiers with skirmishes. there are men who actually are in these prolonged -- the seizure of charlston and stuff like that. varies, but i think it is important to understand the psychological underpinnings of being a member of the army during the war and having that mentality asy well. that can transition into -- i look at the postwar period as

well. men reenter society? how do we describe the psychological trauma they experienced? think these emotions are possible in these relationships catalyzed by the experience or potential experience of being on the battlefield. i think you cannot separate the two. i think rachel's point, rachel's work seems particularly and theto me on this idea of the military family, the bonds of friendship and love that develop between officers and the significance of that when it comes to effective

conduct on the battlefield or of the army. there is a political dimension to this in terms of people, of men and their imaginations, to see who can get ahead. the revolutionary army is in many ways a political institution and i think that is very -- carries forward into the future. out of c andaking , do what that loyalty means you intimately understand someone? you get this mental idea that everyone is having some kind of mind melt with their compatriots on the battlefield and they fully understand -- the use of the word love that is thrown away for -- thrown around freely among officers in the military family. all of these things seem

directly relevant to me to the ,uccessful operation of an army especially in certain difficult of success. waves there are many difficult times during the course of the american revolution for the americans, for the patriot cause, and the significance of what those bonds mean for the ultimate success of the revolutionary effort is between not just the americans but developing those bonds with the french, with their allies, what it means to overcome long-standing prejudices and embrace somebody as your brother in arms. all of those seem like import questions for understanding battlefield successes. as were talking, one of the things that is really striking ,e is, for all of our projects

building up -- it is a different approach within a more traditional looking at battle and strategy and how everything is moving. i think they are, mentor a. i think we are trying to shift the focus a little bit. kind of starting that how did people experience war and then going up that way. >> please tell us who you are. >> i am connie scholz and i am currently the editor of the papers of the revolutionary era statesman. we published the women first. i am going to shamelessly plug our addition of the women's papers and our first volume of the revolutionary war period for the men has a lot of stuff that addresses all of what you're talking about. that are 178 letters thomas pickney is a rising officer writes to his sister harriet, who is clearly acting

as the quartermaster department for him as a young officer from send me clean underwear and i am in need of a bearskin rug to detailed descriptions of camping out. similarly, some wonderful correspondence with nathanael greene about the kind of relationship between a young officer and his senior commanding general in charge. it is almost a father-son relationship in the details of the emotional, not to mention a couple of really quite interesting revolutionary war court-martial's. i am interested in asking you a question. when we did the first volume of the statesman, before they went on to be governors and

ambassadors, we did not have to be very selective. this is a digital edition. in the revolutionary war volume, we published most of the documents we found. we are now moving on and i am beginning to where we are editing the papers of charles pickney and two major generals , co. equalof 1799 but second in a motion to washington with hamilton. then we are going to be working in the next volume after that on thomas pickney, the commanding general for the six army division for the war of 1812. we have to be much more selective. what are the kinds of documents , in a scholarly edition that will make military records

-- what are the kinds of things that as we are making selection decisions where one out of three or maybe one out of four of the documents that we are -- what is the kind of thing for the kind of history includehat you would from military records? there are personal and other records as well, but much of ,hat we have our order books the copies of correspondence with generals. what is the kind of stuff that is going to be most valuable to you as scholars? i am not particularly a military historian. i am in editor. >> i am happy to start. one of the records i find the most fascinating are the most underutilized, in part because they are so hard to find.

court-martial records -- those are fascinating. they really get to the ground level experience and you can unravel those interpersonal and includet happen civilian matters as well as men in the military. --you have any of those court-martial records are not really centralized anywhere. in fellowship at mount vernon, i worked trying to go through the washington papers to find them. they are not usually -- easily searchable or findable. , if you havehose any of those, i definitely recommend showing some of those. >> i would say anything that ins at conversations councils of war or in deliberations. usually there are official

minutes that do not say a whole lot. what maythat reveals have happened that is not in the minutes is so helpful because that is where you get the interpersonal dynamics between the officers. what crazy person brings their pack of hounds to the meetings because he is eccentric and what personnel's a lot? -- what person yells a lot? i do not know if this would be in that sort of record and get point. in the travel diaries, one of my favorite things to come across with descriptions of meals. it gives us a sense of the camaraderie and the time spent at roundtable. one of the travel diaries discusses going to headquarters and visiting with washington and the various courses and then they bring out a giant bowl of and they sit around cracking the nuts for hours and

talking car that particularly detailed -- what were they doing when they were eating the giant bowl of nuts? they were talking about things, any number of things. those details, even if it is just ordering lists for a meal, can be so illustrative if we have the opportunity to dig into them. ofi will leave from role moderator to jump in at historian. general orders. you get a sense of what sort of uniformity the commanding officers -- not just the commanding officer of the army, but right on down through the various organizational levels -- what kind of uniformity they are trying to bring to the service, what sort of things are considered important enough to issue a general order. it is overlooked. it is not particularly fascinating if you do not know what you're reading, but general orders are what holds the army together. i think they ought to be

included. was there a question here? then we will go back. go ahead. that would be you. wait for the microphone. samuel dodge. i'm very interested in this idea expansiveng this new approach of military history and how it relates to combat and the traditional approach to studying the war. the question which comes to my mind is not all conflict is the same. i'm specifically thinking of defeats as opposed to victories. valley forge and yorktown -- the experiences of the soldiers will be very different. new york's occupation of philadelphia, one is perpetual, one is for the winter. if we are going to approach combat and how it relates to these different subjects you are studying, how would you account for the variation in what combat

.ooks like and what that means >> that is a tough one. >> it is hard for me with battles. as i was alluding to, battlefield history is written after the fact. the men fighting it in the moment do not necessarily know what this is going to be named, how this is going to fit into the rest of the picture of the war. how is this going to be remembered? in part, battlefield history is written after. there are lots of sayings, if it is rated by the victor. understanding the aope for -- this sounds look broken record, but individuals on the ground. timeshard -- there are where it is a clear victory and

there are other times where it is a clear defeat as well. emotions different that are attached to that as well. in my experience and in my research, the men themselves do with theas concerned general momentum of the war itself. .hat is left to the higher ups >> i find the variation to be from mybecause research, when i am looking at councils of war, councils were used for how to plan out or make the most of a victory but also how to grapple with defeat. washington convened a number of councils airing the new york wasaign and each time it before a retreat and it was to make sure his officers read with the decision to retreat and make sure there was a record of that you could send to congress.

that was intentional. it was political. it was understanding that leaving new york was going to be a huge psychological blow to the cause and to the economy and everything. there needed to be that political cover. at the same time, if we look at the council that took place just after the very successful battle of trenton, that is strategy. how do you make the most of this opportunity? do you just go back across the delaware and go into winter quarters and lick your wounds and rest up? or do you find a way to go on to princeton and try to hit another blow? both of those serve different purposes but are equally helpful to understanding strategy. i do not mean to imply that all counsel were accessible. there were times when strategy baddecided upon that was

strategy. washington notoriously lost more that isthan he won, but helpful as well. it is important to see the scope in order to appreciate how they were used in all circumstances. to think about the variation , i am interested in civilian experience, were civilians intersect with the military. all of the stuff that lindsay is talking about is part of that. data.helpful to consider what are people's lives like? a lot of them are worried about where is their next meal coming from. for women walking down the street, will they make it home safely? violence may be our two conversations, but to think about the violence that is endemic to war in daily life is a productive way to also think

about it. brokensound look a record, but consider how war affects all of society, people who interact with the military. >> that is a question that could meeting,take an entire the nature of combat and how these -- >> one thing about the diaries. people love commenting on differences. that is human nature, i guess. if you're looking for what is different from one place to another, that is probably one of the biggest focuses of these sorts of accounts. this is different here than what i am used to. one character love to comment on the differences in the way that men and women interact in social situations. this is not directly relevant to her battlefield point, but he comets a lot on that.

differences in the way that people react, fish out of water change from one place to another. the face of battle is illustrated. who is looking at it? who has seen it? when did they see it? what part of the field to the field they see under what circumstances? it would go on forever. go ahead and then we will come to you. united states military academy. this goes to your point. one of the central experiences of warfare, of war, is not just combat and violence but movement, mobility and the dislocation and absurdity of war is obviously combat of violence -- and violence but also movement. in the civil war, there are more books about refugees and

movement in the confederacy. how might your different works address movement and mobility and dislocation during the war? a hand went up right here. wait for the microphone. >> southern methodist university. i have a subject i want to act about -- ask about and the subject -- question is slightly different for lauren and rachel. the subject is nonhome domestic places -- schools, churches, , farms, field. lauren, i have not read all of your work yet, so i wonder how did the gender dynamics of warfare different in those spaces then in the home?

if il, forgive me misquoting you here come i feel like i heard you say something -- the diverse ages and stages of men had not interact to -- interacted with one another in a home of social -- homosocial environment before. i am wondering about the same kinds of spaces, men who would've interacted regularly in churches in the fields and how that might contribute to the formation of the brotherhood outside of the battlefield. >> it is a little confusing. it is their first prolonged experience of this homosocial space for many of them. as you mentioned, one of the ways they would've experienced this before the war is school. for a lot of these men, school is very irregular. education is not in the traditional schoolhouse and many

of them had not gone to college with the exception of some of the officers. not even all of the officers. home, thisfrom nonhome domestic space. away from the familiar environment and being put under ande new restrictions discipline of military life -- it is a perfect storm that creates this new experience for them. when i'm talking about domestic space, there really is focus on the household, but particularly in urban areas the household is out in the neighborhood. i think the places you are identifying are certainly part of that daily life or part of the routines people -- i think

johnifferent fear is -- gilbert mccready has a new book on cornering, the distinctions between which kinds of buildings the army can seize. private homes are not in that but churches and stores are ok. there is that distinction there. obviously there were ripple effect because of that. in philadelphia, the quaker meeting house was taken for quarters. it relocates to mary pemberton's house. her house becomes the space where the meeting is. it is this transformation of space because of the dislocations and the ways in which spaces are being repurposed to accommodate the army and the army's needs forces people to adapt and the meaning of spaces change. particularly pertinent in charleston, where the army starts using sequestration as a way to get

allegiance. allegiance,t swear they will take your property, your slaves. that is a way to compel obedience. that of course has ripple effects. it displaces families and slave labor. some stay with the property and end up -- the british army uses crops toou -- produce feed the army. it kind of opens up this opportunity for people to negotiate spaces. when the army moves, it disrupts. >> can i answer the movement? let me answer the movement question real quick in two ways. i think one factor of the nationalism i discussed is a result of this movement. prior to theow, revolution, most colonists grew up in a place. they do not move far from the place.

they live fairly close to their family. the adams are a great example. the parents had a house. he had a house next door, which i know his wife loved. most people did not move far from where they grew up. that changes when you are marching hundreds of miles away from your home. i think that gave a lot of a different perspective that you would not normally have had. the second part of that is the movement -- we see the movement as a big factor for more of the rank and file infantry. , mostthe war african-american soldiers went back to the place that they were from before. they did not have funds to go elsewhere. they passed down those stories as stories of adventure and something to be proud of. they were proud of their service and they passed them down to their families for generations. that movement was a very important part of getting away

from the town. it was something they were proud of. she has done some work on how white soldiers tended to be able to move more, especially several decades later when she is looking at pension funds. they tend to be more mobile because they have more funds. a lot of soldiers do end up moving if they are able to because once they have done the movement to the first time it unlocks the ability to go beyond their original town. it is a big factor in the experience after the war. >> did not mean to cut you off earlier. go ahead. jefferson papers. i am going to ask an unfair question to a bunch of young scholars. what would you say to a young graduate student who wants to study military history in the early republic but they do not know what to study? what historical questions would you recommend that this hypothetical graduate student

would want to look at? what don't we know as a field that we really want to know? talk about a broad question. [laughter] >> anybody? --anybody the audience to anybody in the audience too. >> if we are talking job purposes or deep intellectual need -- i would say be as interdisciplinary and your approach as possible. you can say good if your work is military and social and cultural and political and explain why. it makes good sense in terms of the market and jobs and fellowships. realist, perhaps dark answer. that will be my answer. >> i do not have a great , but where a

historian tends to start is in the records themselves. i talked about the court-martial records. if you can find them, they are really good to delve into. -- ier one i started started a random sampling of the pension files for the revolutionary war. ofhink, from a lot revolutionary scholars, there is tens of thousands of those. there is a lot of information to mine that you can then build a project off of her work backwards or forwards. mehink they are the link for in my research between the two. we talked a little bit about -- me -- that may be where i am pushing the conversation more, to talk about how do we get from the war itself to the early republic? there are such rich sources created around the military,

whether the continental army or the british army. there are court-martial's, general orders, correspondence. sources --th the women are all over them. there -- that is not a place where gender historians typically look. use the sources as a way to explore the period and view them for their richness and go from there. interesting to me is the -- figuring out what was interesting to the people, the contemporaries. if somebody was really curious about something and wrote a lot about it in their letters or journal, why was that such an interesting thing to them? is there a broader historical question that we as scholars can talk about? why was -- why did people observing american indians for the first time comment on the oiliness of their skin or hair

so much? i know from broader studies of race that ideas about race and correspond tohy ideas of oiliness of skin and hair. there are ways you can -- it could be a blind alley. the idiosyncrasies of the person writing. there may be a broader historical question that is relevant beyond just their own commentary. >> let me jump in on this. going from your question, ,omebody entering the field assume they get into the field and 25 years later they have had a career. look at all these different perspectives we are hearing from today, not only from the panel but from some of you. to reprise the

perspectives you have brought. we are not just scholars in the sense of doing research and writing it up. we are also teachers. synthesis, making it is applicable -- making it slick a bowl -- making it explicable to others. how are we going to take all these points of view on the american revolution and come up with a synthesis that is going to make some sort of sense? anybody want to take a crack at that? [laughter] let me go ahead. there was a synthesis a generation ago. we will call it the republican ideological synthesis. when i was in graduate school, you read -- those who came out of this whole approach to the war for independence, the

american revolution. where is that today? i have seen some of their papers. not even a footnote. has that synthesis disappeared? is it something else going to grow out of it? i do not know. i am asking you. is it possible to come up with a synthesis on the war for independence, weaving all of this stuff together? wouldn't that be something after 25 years of a career or 35 years of a career? put your selves generation ahead. you are all just starting out, more or less. where is it going to go? i will do the undergraduate thing. i will pick one of you at random. >> i have talked about this a little bit with my advisor. she has talked about our generation of historians seems to want to complicate history, in a good way.

perhaps we are not going to have synthesis anymore and we are going to have this more individual perspective that we have promoted here this afternoon of having a ground-level. someone like joseph paul martin, whose name is known to most revolutionary war scholars, perhaps there will be more names that individuals go to instead of having one as this stand in perspective. i think we will have a more something along the lines that the revolution, in order to understand the revolution, you need to understand how -- that it was not a single experience. which does not say a lot. >> i think there can be a synthesis, but i think that most

older syntheses offered an answer that is nice because it is a solid, strong answer, but it does not take into account a lot of things we are bringing up and that maybe syntheses going forward will -- they will look a little messier. revolutionary america was a messy place. that is ok. -- wenot need to have a already bail and and what -- we andady -- we all read balen wood but maybe those do not fit the way we see it now. it was complicated. there were a lot of perspectives. ways people the thought about it or looked at it. that in itself is something that can -- trying to understand why

the nation develops why it does, look at what is messy. people had different experiences. >> that might be more appealing to students because seeing it as this very streamlined chronological narrative arc with theconcerting messiness they see around them on a daily basis. saying here are these guys who seem to have the answers except there were all these problems they acknowledged, that might be more helpful to students. >> good point. >> taking the messiness question, what if our new synthesis was to return to -- put it in a military context? a is not just the war between united states and britain. it is the war within families or between loyalists and patriots.

it is all these different wars which may be does not affect the synthesis but is a common theme of many complex, messy, intersecting conflicts in which may be people try to appeal to certain common values with mixed degrees of success. >> right in back of him? rachel, i was hearing you talk about trauma and about emotions. i think one of the challenges and doing history of emotions seeing emotions as historically contingent and contextual things. there are emotions that existed that may not exist -- or we may not have the words for them in the contemporary period. i'm thinking about the foreignness of the american revolution in the world we sit and now. how do you do a history of

while acknowledging that you have to almost learn a different language, a different emotional language for a different historical context? guessn answer that, but i i invite everybody else to think about the foreignness of the past and how we think about occupation, obviously an apt thing to think about for the last 20 years. and how notions of liberty is and imperial control obviously would be different in this context or even the place of veterans in political life. a broad question about the foreignness of the revolution, something that feels so familiar and so eternal in our national psyche is a fairly foreign place. >> i'm sorry rick is not here. i think you would have a great response. -- he would have a great response. part of the reason why the history of emotions has been so slow to develop is it is so hard. emotions isd that

shown through language. one of the things i do through my research is to show -- too complicated this idea. it is really obvious among officers who use this effusive, -- mynal expressions of deepest love or deeps attachment. say this isthat and a stock for more stock phrases and does not necessarily show us anything more intimate or emotional than actions between soldiers. that is why i love court-martial records. men coming forward to testify on behalf of brothers and watling which they used to describe the actions and interactions between each other is really fruitful. i think it is hard. read backry not to with my 21st century emotional intelligence onto their

relationships and their experiences. i think there are ways in which, like you said, you can contextualize them as well. i think that is what is important. that is where i got the understanding of the language the officers used is using the context. you see it repeated over and over again. you come to realize that maybe that does not mean anything more than the actual language. it is a knowledge that they know how to write that way. formalcan look at the letters anyway. i have had occasion to go into the george washington correspondence recently. they all sign off your most humble, obedient servant. it is laughable, particularly when washington is writing to gaines.

you can read right through it and i am sure washington meant it exactly that way. go ahead, please. kent state university. my primary field is with warrant society. what we are talking about this chaos and confusion -- i think the whole civil war aspect of the american revolution and the war for independence is a perfect thing to talk about i think because we have this conflict and confusion about how do we go about building this estate. during the war, patriots are ok with policing their own frontier. part of what i'm thinking is what isd

massachusetts doing? we are occupying our own people. what you do with that? that is the perfect thing with discussing how to rebuild states and what we want to avoid that we dealt with during the war. i think that idea of how people make sense of it -- traumatic experience and the hardships they endured during war in the early republic is part of this conversation. i think a lot of my work is looking into that. how did people -- how does this experience of living under british occupation change the way they thought about their homes? the way they justified what was occupation versus why what the british did was bad? the waytertwined with people experienced war in a personal way.

on.ur time is running we have about 15 minutes left. all of this has grown under the first question i asked our panel. now that isto one even more general than the first one i posed. consider all of the perspectives you have heard from today, both from the panel and from the questions and comments you have raised. what i'm wondering is the whole idea of the new military history -- do -- i am going to qualify for social security a long time ago in terms of when it came up -- if we want to date it from arms and man, a traditional drumming off point -- go way back into the 19th century stuff. find plenty of stuff you would consider part of the new military history today. -- has the new

military history lost its cachet? is it time to drop that? it. not know what we call just military history. to continually hard on this new military history, new military history, i do not know what that is saying to the profession anymore. take what we have an --d today or at least into it and say it is time to come up with something new or simply call it military history again? it seems that what you have presented to us and what we have heard from the audience is the new norm. how is it new military history? foremost say first and that is partly a ploy to get the panel accepted by the committee. which works. we are here. save new is helpful.

-- saying "new" is helpful. is not speaking to the profession. it is speaking to public perceptions of what military history is and what military historians are. my guess is if you googled military historian, you're probably going to see stock photos of people that do not look like us or talk about the things we are talking about. i think a lot of it is a public framing concept. i have read a lot about all history. i enjoy it. if you do not like that, that is ok. you might still like military history. here is a different aspect. i think the new military history, for me, is not an academic device. it is either a political one or a social one. >> it is the new military history, but the value is not so much in newness. it is a signifier.

it is a cultural and social approach to warfare and adds a sense of priority to the scholarship we are engaging with. it is all military history. if you were to take or if you were to see a military history course in a college catalog, i think the ideas that you talked about, a traditional battle history, that is what you would expect to find. toe you said, it helps signify that this is separate, or at least separate but connected to those. i think the revolution is inclusive of so many things in the 18th century and into the 19th century. there was obviously an important role for battlefield history. i don't mean that in an insulting way.

many of the things that happened during the course of the war that did not happen on the battlefield affected so many of the things that came after the war as everyone here has suggested, including, we talked a little bit about thelity, a little bit about international consequence, to make a plea for an international understanding of the age of revolution which is not an original plea at this point. it is understood that it is within a larger atlantic context. you have a few years here, 10 years, 15 years, 30 years, depending on how broadly you define it, where people from all over the atlantic world are around the apparatus of fighting battles. and all of the things that

happened in addition to fighting battles are in the course of human history. is all military history. yes, it is all history innocence and that is the beauty of the discipline. well, if the audience thinks they do not have anything else --say and our panelists have that's it. all right. thank you all for coming. i will just end with sort of where we began. ast the american revolution, an example of military history, oferally, has any number opportunities and any perspective can generally bear on it. what we have heard today is indicative of what is going on in the field. those of you who are active in it, i am assuming that is most of you in the audience, are fully aware of that. let me give you two quick

examples before we sign off. sort of a school for leadership. you are looking at senior leadership, very recently, a dissertation looks at jr. officers and ceos. what happened to them after the war. what's deals of leadership did they pick up in their time in the army? did that have an impact on state formation? yes it did. they looked at three states in of ohio, appalachia tennessee and kentucky. it was jr. up sirs and not commissioned -- officers and not commissioned officers who ended up town clerks. any number of lower order administrative posts both elective and appointed. they served, using the skills they picked up for leadership in the army at a much greater rate

than those who had not served in the military during the war. your court-martial's at west has taken ascully database of every known court-martial in the continental army and is trying to draw the implications of what these court-martial's meant, how they relationships between enlisted ranks. this was happening. the the topics approached is the future. may be that is more fun. that, thank you very much. [applause] american history tv products are now available at the new

c-span online store. go to c-span store.org to see what is new for american history tv and check out all of the c-span products. announcer: the battle of fort stevens was fought in the northwest action of washington, d.c., in july 1864. when confederate forces probed the capital city defenses before turning back. the national park service and the alliance to preserve the civil war defenses of washington commemorated the battle's 155th anniversary with speakers, interpreters, and usable tribute -- musical tributes. >> good morning. good morning, good morning. i would like to welcome you to historic fort stevens. come on up. [laughter] on behalf of the national park