Robert M Calhoon

This is a new edition of the germinal study of Loyalism in the American Revolution. Building on the work of his 1989 book, ""The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays"", accomplished historian Robert M. Calhoon returns to the subject of internal strife in the American Revolution with Tory Insurgents. This volume collects revised, updated versions of eighteen groundbreaking articles, essays, and chapters published since 1965, and it also features one essay original to this volume. In a model of scholarly collaboration, coauthors Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert Scott Davis are joined in select pieces by Donald C. Lord, Janice Potter, and Robert M. Weir. Among the topics broached by this noted group of historians are the diverse political ideals represented in the Loyalist stance; the coherence of the Loyalist press; the loyalism of garrison towns, the Floridas, and the Western frontier; Carolina loyalism as viewed by Irish-born patriots Aedanus and Thomas Burke; and, the postwar reintegration of Loyalists as citizens of the new nation. Included as well is a chapter and epilogue from Calhoon's seminal - but long out-of-print - 1973 study ""The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781"". This updated collection will serve as an unrivaled point of entrance into Loyalist research for scholars and students of the American Revolution.

This book is the first collection of Loyalist scholarship to span the 13 independent states and the Florida and Canadian provinces that remained loyal to the Crown in the American Revolution. The Loyalists disrupted the colonial communities in which they lived in ways that helped define the Revolution. Loyalist garrison towns became a pathological environment of violence and suspicion, which brought out the worst in patriot, British, and Loyalist behavior. In Canada, Loyalist exiles tried to create model Anglo-American communities, but in the end had to jettison Loyalist ideology to claim a new British North American identity.