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The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History) Paperback – September 30, 2014
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"Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy has written a remarkable book about an important but curiously underappreciated subject: the British side of the American Revolution. With meticulous scholarship and an eloquent writing style, O'Shaughnessy gives us a fresh and compelling view of a critical aspect of the struggle that changed the world. This is a great book."—Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Winner of the 2014 George Washington Book Prize sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon
The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? This intriguing book makes a different argument. Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men who directed the British dimension of the war, historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory. In interlinked biographical chapters, the author follows the course of the war from the perspectives of King George III, Prime Minister Lord North, military leaders including General Burgoyne, the Earl of Sandwich, and others who, for the most part, led ably and even brilliantly. Victories were frequent, and in fact the British conquered every American city at some stage of the Revolutionary War. Yet roiling political complexities at home, combined with the fervency of the fighting Americans, proved fatal to the British war effort. The book concludes with a penetrating assessment of the years after Yorktown, when the British achieved victories against the French and Spanish, thereby keeping intact what remained of the British Empire.
- Reading age1 year and up
- Print length496 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- PublisherYale University Press
- Publication dateSeptember 30, 2014
- ISBN-100300209401
- ISBN-13978-0300209402
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"An extensively researched, gracefully written study."—John Taylor, Washington Times
"[O’Shaughnessy] shatters entrenched stereotypes."—William Anthony Hay, The National Interest
"A delightfully myth-shattering book."—Open Letters Monthly
"[A] superb new study . . . the work of an historian in thorough command of his sources who writes with admirable grace and acuity. Since this is only his second book, we can all look forward to many more good things from Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy."—Edward Short, The Weekly Standard
Winner of the 2013 Great Midwest Book Festival in the Regional Literature category, given by JM Northern Media LLC
Winner of the 2014 Cincinnati History Prize sponsored by the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE), in the U.S. History category
Winner of the 2014 George Washington Book Prize sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the prize recognizes the year’s best books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history
Finalist for the 2013 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History
"Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy has written a remarkable book about an important but curiously underappreciated subject: the British side of the American Revolution. With meticulous scholarship and an eloquent writing style, O'Shaughnessy gives us a fresh and compelling view of a critical aspect of the struggle that changed the world. This is a great book."—Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
"Scrupulously researched and superbly written, these humanizing portraits of conventional cardboard figures from American history offer, like all great history, lessons for today: military might does not guarantee political success; do not try to govern that which you do not own; and resist empire's temptations."—Gary Hart, United States Senator (Ret.)
"Deeply researched, carefully argued, and clearly written, The Men Who Lost America cuts through the thick crust of romantic myths to cast the American Revolution in a refreshing new light. Blessed with an impartial, open mind, Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy reveals the talents as well as the human foibles of a rich cast of intriguing characters including America's last king. In the end, O'Shaughnessy gives the American revolutionaries exactly what their story has so long needed: worthy adversaries who fought hard and well."—Alan Taylor, author of The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies
"Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Men Who Lost America is a great achievement. It will provide any interested reader with a delightfully user-friendly way of understanding how and why the British lost the revolutionary war."—Pauline Maier, author of Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788
"Much of [the book's] value lies in the sheer volume of engaging material it brings together and in the originality of its organization and approach to a much studied question, namely why Britain lost the War of the American Revolution. . . . A treasure-trove of information on the British operation of the War.”—Richard Johnson, University of Washington
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Yale University Press; First Edition (September 30, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 496 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0300209401
- ISBN-13 : 978-0300209402
- Reading age : 1 year and up
- Item Weight : 1.55 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #234,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #186 in American Revolution Biographies (Books)
- #226 in Historical British Biographies
- #439 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy is a Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Between 2003 and 2023, he was Vice President of Monticello and the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He is the author of An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2013), and The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson's Idea of a University (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021).
www.andrewjoshaughnessy.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_O%27Shaughnessy_(historian)
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/for-scholars/international-center-for-jefferson-studies/author-andrew-o-shaughnessy/about-the-author/
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Most Americans with even a passing knowledge of history know the major outlines of the American Revolution. We know about the increasingly autocratic British, the struggle to form a cohesive response to the British rule by a loose confederation of colonies, the long odds against the continental army, the emergence of a brilliant military leader in General Washington, and the ultimate victory against the demoralized British. We know about the brilliant American leaders who fought the war and then led the colonies into nationhood. What is much less clear, even to careful students of the Revolution, is the context within which Great Britain struggled to fight the war in North America at the same time as it was dealing with an assortment of European protagonists in many military theaters around the world. Further, it is quite common to read histories of the American Revolution that deal only cursorily with the personalities that were leading the military strategies and planning in London. Little is known to the American audience about the huge financial burden imposed on Britain by these simultaneous wars. Practically nothing is known about the increasing skepticism within Parliament, including the similar views of the Prime Minister, that the war in America could ever be won.
This broader perspective is new to this reader. It is enormously satisfying to shift the focus from the American continent to London. What seemed to be almost a miraculous victory, eventually won in Yorktown in 1781, turns out to be close to inevitable once the French navy sailed into the war in 1779. Britain had a far better trained army and navy, led by carefully selected generals and admirals but these forces were far from home and, through attrition and desertion the army was reduced in size by 50% within the first three years of the war. The American forces lost battles but never lost hope and were able to regroup and refresh time and time again. This process of regeneration hurt the British after Cornwallis came close to annihilating the continental army in Long Island in 1776; ultimately the British lost their will and began to make fatal military mistakes.
We learn about the growing dissension in the British government not only about the strategy of the war but, far more, about the soundness of the decision to fight the war. Very little in O'Shaughnessy's story is about the American leaders. Instead, we learn about a quite different group of leaders: the king, George III, who was a steady influence on his government, with an iron will to retain the colonies at all costs; Lord North, the Prime Minister for most of the war, who continuously doubted the ability of Britain to win the war and tried unsuccessfully for years to resign; the Howe brothers who led the Army and the Navy during much of the war and made mounting tactical and strategic mistakes; Lord Burgoyne who led the British forces during their earliest defeat, at Saratoga; Lord Germain, the chief architect of the British strategy in America, who unsuccessfully juggled military resources between Central America, the Caribbean and the American continent - it was Germain who steadfastly believed that Americans were at root loyal to the British crown; Sir Henry Clinton who shifted much of the British army from the northeast of the continent to the South and to the Caribbean, draining fighting power from the most important zones of the war; and Cornwallis, who fought the final major battle of the war in Yorktown, ignominiously outfoxed and outfought by the American army. From this decisive defeat came the surrender of Cornwallis' entire army and the destruction of much of the British naval fleet just off the shore of Virginia.
It must be said that the shift in focus of the story of the American Revolution is not only refreshing since it adds so much to a better understanding of what London was facing in this war, only one of three or four that Britain was simultaneously fighting, but it is also extremely well researched and well written. This is a major contribution to learning a fuller version of the American Revolution.
The reader gets an invaluable look at the three primary reasons that the war was not only lost, but doomed to failure before it commenced. First, the British grossly misjudged the number of loyalists among the American population, their commanders waiting time and again, against all hope, for pro-British colonists to come forward to fight with them. Second, and despite the fact that a good map would have revealed the truth of it, they under-appreciated the sheer size of the theater they were trying to conquer and hold, essentially never succeeding in first taking and then being able to secure any sizeable chunk of territory. Third, and perhaps most crucially, they simply could neither afford nor transport enough men and materiel to overwhelm the opposition. Add to these reasons the more subtle but nonetheless crucial inability of the leadership to set and adhere to priorities among Britain’s Caribbean holdings, the continuing threat of French and/or Spanish intervention, and other pressing demands, and you have all the makings of the disaster that inevitably ensued.
The book does present a couple of issues, though. The first and most important is the difficulty faced by any author who undertakes to fashion joint biographies of contemporaries engaged in the same enterprise, repetition of events and attitudes. For instance, by the time the reader has completed the portraits of George III and Prime Minister Lord North, he understands many times over that North early on really, really, absolutely, urgently, and honest to goodness wanted to resign. Indeed, the reader understands so well that he is tempted to resign himself, resign, that is, from reading the rest of the book. Second, the author is a pedestrian writer who while he does a decent job of portraying the respective roles of the subjects, lapses into Wikipedia-like flatness when he sets out the ‘after-action’ lives of the protagonists. Finally, and as I wrote in my review of “The Siege of Fort William Henry,” I guess authors don’t want to take the time to consult Mapquest or Google Earth when citing locations and distances. On page 142, O’Shaughnessy writes, “The delay allowed the enemy force to strengthen their fortifications at Crown Point and Ticonderoga, the former situated at the north end of Lake George and the latter near the southern end of Lake Champlain.” Uh, no. Ticonderoga is indeed located at the southern end of Lake Champlain, and Crown Point is located approximately 10 miles NNW, just a bit farther up Champlain’s western shore and relatively nowhere near Lake George.
All in all, this a most worthwhile read, and not only because you won’t find the same amalgam somewhere else. It stands alone as an excellent and unique piece of scholarship, innovative and long overdue.
Top reviews from other countries
As often with modern history books it drags a little towards the end - almost as though a certain number of words were required by the publisher - but stll a good read.