A People Numerous & Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Revised Edition)

Americans like to think of themselves as a peace-loving people, and in remembering their own revolutionary past, American historians have long tended to focus on colonial origins and Constitutional aftermath, neglecting the fact that the American Revolution was a long, hard war. John Shy shifts the focus to the war itself and explores the ways in which the experience was entangled with both the causes and the consequences of the Revolution. This is not a traditional military chronicle of battles and campaigns, but a series of essays that recapture the social, political, and even intellectual dimensions of the military effort that created an American nation.