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Title: Rebels and Redcoats
Harper Collins
Item Number: 9780007156269
Number: 1
Product Description: Rebels and Redcoats
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780007156269
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780007156269
Rating: 3/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/62/69/9780007156269.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Steven Boslau
reviewed Rebels and Redcoats on February 15, 2021I have mixed feelings about this book.
Great maps!
Well researched. I appreciated the references to other historians.
There is a pro-British, anti-American bias but I can live with that.
However, it was a tough, dry read. The next book I read was just a joy in comparison.
p. xx: "I grow increasingly impatient with historians whose wars have no battles, or whose battles have no maps."
p. xxviii: "The next day they brought in more victims and added them to the pile of mutilated corpses inside the little schoolhouse and then burned it along with the rest of the village in an futile attempt to conceal their crime." -- Sounds like something from Vietnam
p. 2: "The fear of a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world -- a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption and of which, it was felt, oppression in America was only the most immediately visible part."
p. 2: "The Founding Father of the paranoid style and the foremost advocate of violent confrontation with Britain was the Bostonian Samuel Adams."
p. 6: "Nonetheless they would not necessarily have been moved to armed rebellion had it not been that their own status in colonial society was threatened by incendiary proselytism and unchecked mob action."
p. 15: "[The rebellion] would almost certainly have ended with a compromise settlement in 1777-78 if France had not intervened overtly."
p. 17: "Those who respect established authority and value order are at a severe disadvantage when these come under assault, because they look to the authorities they respect to restore the order they value."
p. 17-8: "Against this, had the Rebel cause enjoyed the popular support, nobility of purpose and divine blessing that constitute three sides of the Foundation Myth pyramid, a devout and effective force of property owners akin to Cromwell's Ironsides should have emerged to build the fourth."
p 30: "[Dr. Joseph Warren]'s body was later identified by Paul Revere from some dental work he had performed, the first recorded example of what is now a common-place of forensic medicine."
p. 41: "The Declaration represented an irrevocable act of treason, causing reluctance even among those who voted for it to append their signatures."
p. 42: "Although the war conducted by Sandwich at the Admiralty, Germain at the Colonial Office and the Howes in America could undoubtedly have been waged better in the absolute, they were among the most able men of their class at this time, and there is little reason to believe any other combination -- under North -- would have produced a better result."
p. 53: "The loss of Fort Washington was the culmination of a series of gross command blunders, all deriving from an amateur's underestimation of what a properly handled professional army could do."
p. 58: "When the moment came he was saved because armies are like enormous dogs, anxious to believe their master knows what he is doing and heartbreakingly willing to give him another chance even after he has repeatedly abused their trust. The glory in the events that followed was not the Washington managed to redeem months of defeat and retreat with a resounding victory at the eleventh hour, but that when he decided to strike back there were just enough men willing to follow his lead. There should be a monument to them standing proud of all the other memorials in the capital named for their general, because his fame, that city, and all it contains, stand on their faithful shoulders."
p. 60: "Howe's desire for order made good military sense as well, because regular armies by their nature cannot wage revolutionary war."
p. 62: "British officers at this time did refer to Washington as 'the fox,' not because they esteemed him either clever or quick, but because they thought he had dived into his earth, whence the Hessian hounds would dig him up in the 1777 campaigning season."
p. 69: "For the duration of the war the Continental Army was obliged to take what it needed, while the cash-paying British Army obtained whatever it wanted from inhabitants who were restrained only by the threat of Rebel reprisals. Although Clinton and Cornwallis were later to find it a convenient excuse for inaction and surrender respectively, there was never any serious shortage of necessities on the British side, while Washington's army was at times immobilized and wracked by mutinies because of constant want amid an indifferent or hostile civilian population."
p. 82: Germantown: "It was a severe, demoralizing and predictable defeat that pitilessly exposed Washington's limitations."
p. 84: "For the Rebels, a conquest of Canada depended on the fantasy that French Roman Catholics would rally to a furiously Anglo-Protestant cause."
p. 90: "It was the shipping shortage which had retarded Howe's reinforcements from Europe, further delaying his offensive. It was very probably the pressure on the dockyards which had prevented Carleton from being supplied early and adequately with the means of commanding Lake Champlain. Perhaps the influence of the ocean was never again to appear in so visible a form during the course of the war. But always the cold wastes of the Atlantic were to exert their invisible stranglehold on the British operations."
p. 112: On Franklin: "Along with the rest of the American delegation he was raking in commissions on supplies bought with French money, peculations more than tolerated by Vergennes, and had much to lose by an early peace. ... In sum, a pioneer PR man whose principal client was himself."
p. 115: "Vergennes' aim was to force the Royal Navy to concentrate in home waters, thus unable to protect British interests in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean."
p . 115: "Washington was alert to this, and wrote to warn that, treaty or no, a Canada won with the help of France would become French again."
p. 115: Washington: "It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted further than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it."
p. 123: Don Hibbinbotham: "This would not be the last time that American diplomats would equate the interests of their country with those of the world."
p. 128: "La Fayette [sic] was in bad odour with the French court, and the over-promotion of a notorious dilettante merely deepened the contempt in which career French officers were already inclined to hold their rustic allies."
p. 128: "It is far more likely they were disenchanted by the partiality shown by Washington to what Lee sourly called his 'earwigs', the handsome and ambitious young men of his personal entourage."
p. 132: "If there is anything praiseworthy in the Angl0-American treatment of the indigenous peoples of North America, I regret it has escaped by notice. It was genocidal from the beginning...."
p. 153: "The broad conclusion to be drawn from the northern and northwestern fronts during the latter part of the war is that the Americans squandered the moral effect of the victory at Saratoga, and were hopelessly unprepared for the qualitative change in warfare that came about once the British abandoned their illusions about reconciliation.... The manner in which Americans were now voting with their purses and their feet shows that few believed in them anymore."
p. 158: "The successful defence of this fort has a good claim to being the most important American victory of the war."
p. 186: Hamilton on Gates: "One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half. It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life. But it disgraces the general and the soldier."
p. 190: Cornwallis: "Legion, remember you have everything to lose, but nothing to gain."
p. 195: King's Mountain: "In a toe-to-toe contest between equal forces the Americans had been overwhelmingly victorious, largely offsetting the moral effect of Camden."
p. 205: Roderick Mackenzie of the 71st: "I leave to Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton all the satisfaction which he can enjoy from relating that he led a number of brave men to destruction, and then used every effort in his power to damn their fame with posterity."
p. 223: Eutaw Springs: "Barring those involving Indians it was the most ferocious battle of the war."
p. 227: "In September the Scots slaver and pirate John Paul alias Jones .... Not many other career criminals have been similarly honoured."
p. 236: "As a man clinging to a post for which he was unfitted Clinton possibly merited the contempt in which he was held by Germain, his naval colleagues and his subordinates, but they all merit like condemnation for withholding the formal loyalty due his rank, if not his person."
p. 243: "The battle [of Cape Henry] that followed was the only major French victory at sea since Beachy Head (Beveziers) in 1690."
p. 247: "There is food for thought here--Germans fighting for both the French and the British, Irishmen serving in all three armies, almost as many white Americans in the British as there were in a Continental Army in which, of three divisional commanders, one was a French nobleman and another a Prussian mercenary, and which was becoming increasingly dependent on slaves volunteered by their owners to take their place, or by African American paid substitutes."
p. 251: "However, one calculates who won, there is no disagreement that the Indians were the greatest losers."
p. 256-7: "Jefferson commented in a letter to a friend he naively thought would remain confidential, 'men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot of England.' After this was made public, Washington never spoke or wrote to him again."
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