A Revolutionary People At War

The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783

By Charles Royster

502 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 29 halftones, appends., notes, index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4606-3
    Published: September 1996
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-9983-0
    Published: February 2011
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6681-3
    Published: February 2011

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

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Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Awards & distinctions

1981 Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians

1981 National Historical Society Book Prize

1981 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York

1980 Silver Medal, Nonfiction, Commonwealth Club of California

1979 John D. Rockefeller III Award

In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.

About the Author

Charles Royster, Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University, is the author of The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution and The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, which received the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Award in Southern History.


For more information about Charles Royster, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Represents a quantum leap in our understanding of the Revolution. . . . [The book] is social history, intellectual history, institutional history, political history, and not any single one of them, which is to say that it is good history."--Edmund S. Morgan, New Republic

"To a far greater extent than is true of most historical monographs, it is a work of art. . . . No student of early American history should miss it."--Journal of Southern History