Events

The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture could not have been further from the truth. Whether trudging through alligator-infested swamps, nursing a comrade back to health in a rain-sodden tent or digging trenches in a burned-out port city, most who fought in America under the British army’s flag ultimately deemed themselves strangers fighting in a strange land. For them, Revolutionary America looked nothing like the “happy land . . . blessed with every climate” that Revolutionary republicans so successfully promoted. Instead, the War of Independence descended into a quagmire of anxiety, destruction and distress at the hands of the American environment—a “Diabolical Country,” as one British soldier opined. Drawing from his new book, Vaughn Scribner of the University of Arkansas illustrates how foreign soldiers’ negative perceptions of the American environment merged with harsh wartime realities to elicit considerable physical, mental and emotional anguish.

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About the Speaker

Vaughn Scribner, Ph.D., is a historian who researches early American history in a global context, specifically striving to understand how early modern Britons sought to define—and redefine—their positions in the empire. He earned his Ph.D. in early American history from the University of Kansas in 2013 and has since been on the faculty of the University of Central Arkansas, where he currently serves as an associate professor of history. Throughout his career, Dr. Scribner has authored several books, including Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society (NYU Press, 2019), an analysis of early Americans’ mercurial attempts at realizing a “civil society” through the lens of the urban tavern, and Merpeople: A Human History (Reaktion Books, 2020), which explores humanity’s long-held obsession with merpeople to gain a deeper understanding of one of the most mysterious, capricious and dangerous creatures on earth: humans. His other publications range from an investigation of how colonists used mineral springs to transform the natural environment to an analysis of Caribbean sugar plantation slavery to a biographical study of Prince William Henry, the first British royal to set foot in America. They have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Early American Studies, the Journal of Social History, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Urban History, Itinerario, Agricultural History, the Journal of Early American History, and the edited volumes Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake and A Cultural History of Leisure in the Enlightenment.