Audiobook14 hours
Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution
Written by Kathleen DuVal
Narrated by Susan Boyce
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
In Independence Lost, Kathleen DuVal recounts the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida's Gulf Coast.
Independence Lost reveals that individual motives counted as much as the ideals of liberty and freedom the Founders espoused: Independence had a personal as well as national meaning, and the choices made by people living outside the colonies were of critical importance to the war's outcome. DuVal introduces us to the Mobile slave Petit Jean, who organized militias to fight the British at sea; the Chickasaw diplomat Payamataha, who worked to keep his people out of war; New Orleans merchant Oliver Pollock and his wife, Margaret O'Brien Pollock, who risked their own wealth to organize funds and garner Spanish support for the American Revolution; and Scottish loyalists James and Isabella Bruce, whose work on behalf of the British Empire placed them in grave danger. Their lives illuminate the fateful events that took place along the Gulf of Mexico and, in the process, changed the history of North America itself.
Independence Lost reveals that individual motives counted as much as the ideals of liberty and freedom the Founders espoused: Independence had a personal as well as national meaning, and the choices made by people living outside the colonies were of critical importance to the war's outcome. DuVal introduces us to the Mobile slave Petit Jean, who organized militias to fight the British at sea; the Chickasaw diplomat Payamataha, who worked to keep his people out of war; New Orleans merchant Oliver Pollock and his wife, Margaret O'Brien Pollock, who risked their own wealth to organize funds and garner Spanish support for the American Revolution; and Scottish loyalists James and Isabella Bruce, whose work on behalf of the British Empire placed them in grave danger. Their lives illuminate the fateful events that took place along the Gulf of Mexico and, in the process, changed the history of North America itself.
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Reviews for Independence Lost
Rating: 3.727272681818182 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
11 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5DuVal brings attention to a little-known (at least to me) aspect of the American Revolutionary War era: events and people in the area that surrounds the Gulf of Mexico. She also covers the involvement of diverse types of people: Native-Americans tribes, the slave Petit Jean, negotiator Alexander McGillivray who was Scots-Creek, and others. Sometimes I‘d lose the thread of the overall history when she‘d zoom into one of these individuals; but overall enlightening.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A history focused on the southeastern North American colonies, from which the Revolution looked less important than the larger imperial contests of which it was a part. DuVal argues that “independence” wasn’t an important concept in the way we now understand it; instead, relationships of dependence and interaction were key to how people and peoples structured their lives.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When you cut to the chase this book is mostly a history of the American Revolution in the South as an imperial war between Britain & Spain and how local communities decided what sides they were on; in this perspective the Chickasaw and Creek nations were rather more relevant than the doings of the Patriot government in Philadelphia. I tend to agree with some Amazon reviewers that DuVal's focus on exemplary individuals as stand-ins for whole communities can feel a little schematic at times, but for the person this book is aimed at the notion of the Indian tribes having an organized foreign policy is still probably a novel concept. This is besides the emphasis on communities seeking better relationships with other communities AS a community, not the then rising American notion of a polity based on a society of free white men with minimal social commitments to each other.