Annual Report


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Invasion and Insurrection


Book Description

This book seeks to discover when, why, and how Delaware Valley communities, between 1621, when the Dutch West India Company issued instructions for the security and defense of the Delaware River until 1815, as the region abandoned its Committee of Defense of the Delaware at the end of the War of 1812, first used military force to repel invasion in times of war and suppress insurrection in peacetime. It traces how these mid-Atlantic communities confronted constant threats from real or imagined enemies, invasion and insurrection from earliest seventeenth-century settlement, and articulated ideas and built institutions for security, defense, and war. It argues that from the beginning these Delaware Valley communities failed to differentiate between their concert for defense against external attacks or invasion in wartime with that of providing security for their home communities against internal enemies durins peacetime. Though conflicted about using force both to defend against invasion and suppress insurrection, over time as the Delaware Valley communities moved to the center of colonial wars, revolution, and establishment of a republic and constitutional government, their long experience with security, defense, and war that blurred the lines between military defense in wartime and preserving peacetime security eventually fused into Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution to "empower the congress to use the militia to repel invasion and suppress insurrection." Jeffery M. Dorwart is professor of military, naval, and New Jersey history at Rutgers University.







Catalogue ... 1807-1871


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The Acadian Diaspora


Book Description

Late in 1755, an army of British regulars and Massachusetts volunteers completed one of the cruelest, most successful military campaigns in North American history, capturing and deporting seven thousand French-speaking Catholic Acadians from the province of Nova Scotia, and chasing an equal number into the wilderness of eastern Canada. Thousands of Acadians endured three decades of forced migrations and failed settlements that shuttled them to the coasts of South America, the plantations of the Caribbean, the frigid islands of the South Atlantic, the swamps of Louisiana, and the countryside of central France. The Acadian Diaspora tells their extraordinary story in full for the first time, illuminating a long-forgotten world of imperial desperation, experimental colonies, and naked brutality. Using documents culled from archives in France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, Christopher Hodson reconstructs the lives of Acadian exiles as they traversed oceans and continents, pushed along by empires eager to populate new frontiers with inexpensive, pliable white farmers. Hodson's compelling narrative situates the Acadian diaspora within the dramatic geopolitical changes triggered by the Seven Years' War. Faced with redrawn boundaries and staggering national debts, imperial architects across Europe used the Acadians to realize radical plans: tropical settlements without slaves, expeditions to the unknown southern continent, and, perhaps strangest of all, agricultural colonies within old regime France itself. In response, Acadians embraced their status as human commodities, using intimidation and even violence to tailor their communities to the superheated Atlantic market for cheap, mobile labor. Through vivid, intimate stories of Acadian exiles and the diverse, transnational cast of characters that surrounded them, The Acadian Diaspora presents the eighteenth-century Atlantic world from a new angle, challenging old assumptions about uprooted peoples and the very nature of early modern empire.