• Essential Workers
• Woody Holton (bio)

These three investigations of the American Revolution focus on civilians in military contexts. All were completed while Officer Brian Sicknick and George Floyd still breathed but speak loudly to present-day concerns. Serena Zabin and T. Cole Jones depict colonists’ and rebels’ complex and contradictory interactions with the Royal Army, while T.H. Breen documents their equally conflicted treatment of Loyalists. Jones’s Captives of Liberty challenges Americans’ widely shared belief in their ethical exceptionalism. Zabin’s Boston Massacre reveals men in uniform abusing Boston residents in a variety of ways, provoking an urban insurrection that exposed both sides’ conflicting loyalties. And Breen’s Will of the People is a meditation on civilians’ occasional resort to violence and their leaders’ less-frequent efforts to restrain them. All three authors paint their protagonists as torn between countervailing pressures to treat Loyalists and redcoats harshly or humanely. In this and other quandaries, Americans’ ambits were circumscribed by their fears for loved ones who had either joined or been captured by the enemy. In that sense as well as others, these three works should all be considered contributions to the history of emotion.

In the midst of the American War of Independence, Thomas Jefferson urged his fellow advocates for religious liberty to strike while the iron was hot. “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia. “It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded.”¹ A wagon glides down a mountain road, even without an animal [End Page 34] in the traces, and in normal times, the governing class glides right along, too. Only when it must “resort every moment to the people for support” will it attend to their demands. In all three books under review, ordinary Americans discovered their importance to the battle against Britain—but also that their influence was ephemeral. Numerous scholars have shown how eighteenth-century Native Americans and African Americans used their military value to Europeans and European Americans to obtain concessions from them. These three books focus, as Jefferson did, on free whites, documenting their still-greater success at getting paid for their work. It becomes clear that even for them, democratization was advanced less by the American Revolution’s ideals than by its leaders’ labor shortage.

Each of these three authors signed with a different kind of publisher. Captives of Liberty was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Zabin landed a coveted commercial contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And Breen’s Will of the People, the Goldilocks of the group, comes to us from the semi-commercial Harvard University Press. But all three authors make their arguments in the form of stories—an especially admirable trait in Jones, since this is his first book. So all three works are likely to have both academic and popular appeal.

In just 234 pages, Serena Zabin’s Boston Massacre: A Family History tells two distinct but related stories: one about female “camp followers” in the eighteenth-century Royal Army and the other about how the British women and men who occupied Boston from 1768 to 1770 got on with the locals. Zabin makes a powerful case that “camp follower” is a slur, but we early Americanists are probably stuck with it, along with other originally insulting terms, from Puritan, Quaker, Shaker, and Mormon to the Pontiac and Whiskey Rebellions (p. 3). She notes that the Royal Army routinely provided half rations to 60 women in every 600-man regiment, an implicit acknowledgement of their vital work as cooks, cleaners, and seamstresses...

• 基本工人
• 伍迪霍尔顿（生物）

对美国独立战争的这三项调查着眼于军事环境中的平民。当布莱恩·西尼克（Brian Sicknick）军官和乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）军官仍然屏息呼吸时，所有事情都完成了，但大声地谈论了当今的担忧。塞雷纳·扎宾（Serena Zabin）和T.科尔·琼斯（T. Cole Jones）描绘了殖民者和叛乱分子与皇家军之间复杂而矛盾的互动，而TH·布赖恩（TH Breen）记录了他们对忠诚主义者的同等对待。琼斯的“自由俘虏”挑战了美国人对其道德例外主义的广泛认同。扎宾的《波士顿大屠杀》揭示了穿着制服的男子以各种方式虐待波士顿居民，引发了城市起义，揭露了双方的忠诚度冲突。和布林的人民意志这是对平民偶尔诉诸暴力以及他们的领导人为遏制暴力而较少采取的努力的沉思。这三位作者都将他们的主角描绘成在对付忠实者和重装者的反压力之间相互撕扯。在这种困境和其他困境中，美国人对陷入敌军或被敌人俘虏的亲人的恐惧限制了他们的野心。从这种意义上以及其他意义上来说，这三部作品都应被视为对情感史的贡献。

在美国独立战争中，托马斯·杰斐逊（Thomas Jefferson）敦促他的宗教自由倡导者在铁杆热时罢工。他在《弗吉尼亚州笔记》中写道：“从这场战争结束后，我们将走下坡路。” “那么，就不必在任何时候都向人民求助。因此，他们将被遗忘，而他们的权利将被无视。” ¹即使没有动物，旅行车也会沿着山路滑下[End Page 34]在痕迹上，在平时，领导阶级也一直在滑行。只有当它“每时每刻都在向人民寻求支持”时，它才会满足他们的要求。在所有三本书中，普通美国人发现了他们对与英国作战的重要性，但他们的影响力是短暂的。许多学者展示了18世纪的美洲原住民和非裔美国人如何利用其对欧洲人的军事价值，并从欧洲人那里获得了让步。正如杰斐逊所做的那样，这三本书将重点放在自由白人身上，记录了他们在获得报酬方面取得了更大的成功。显然，即使对他们来说，民主化的推动程度也不是美国革命的理想，而是领导者的劳动力短缺。

这三位作者中的每位都与另一种类型的出版商签了字。自由俘虏由宾夕法尼亚大学出版社出版。Zabin与Houghton Mifflin Harcourt签订了梦co以求的商业合同。布雷恩的《人民的意志》，这个团体的金发姑娘，来自半商业性的哈佛大学出版社。但是所有三位作者都是以故事的形式提出自己的观点的，这是琼斯的一个特别令人钦佩的特质，因为这是他的第一本书。因此，这三部作品都可能同时具有学术和大众吸引力。

塞雷纳·扎宾（Serena Zabin）的《波士顿大屠杀：家族史》仅234页，讲述了两个截然不同但又相关的故事：一个是关于18世纪皇家军中女性“营地追随者”的，另一个是关于1768年至1768年占领波士顿的英国男女如何经历的1770年与当地人相处。Zabin有力地证明“阵营追随者”是一种侮辱，但我们早期的美国主义者可能会坚持使用它，以及其他最初的侮辱性用语，从清教徒，贵格会，沙克尔和摩门教徒到庞蒂亚克和威士忌酒起义（第3页） ）。她指出，皇家陆军通常每600名士兵向60名妇女提供一半的口粮，这隐含地承认了她们作为厨师，清洁工和裁缝师的重要工作……