A handy guide to current historical thinking on the American Revolution

The July issue of the Journal of Military History has a good article by Purdue historian T. Cole Jones on the treatment of Tories during the American Revolution. I didn’t know, for example, that historians now think that 19 percent of white American adults opposed the revolution.

Nor did I know that conditions on the American prison ships were worse than those on the British ones. (I did know that the Newgate prison, just north of Hartford, CT, was awful — prisoners were put in an old copper mine, nearly 70 feet below ground. I keep on meaning to visit it but it was closed for renovations the last time I was in the area.)

But what I really liked about Jones’s article were the footnotes, which amount to a bibliography of recent historical work on the American Revolution.

Meantime, a book review elsewhere in the same July issue has a great “lead,” or “lede,” as journalists write it. Asks the Naval Academy’s Richard Ruth, “How do you solve a problem like Norodom Sihanouk?”

Photo credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York