The Year of the Hangman: George Washington's Campaign Against the Iroquois
Author: Glenn F Williams
With the entry of France on the American side, the War for Independence moved from a regional conflict to a global war. To offset this new alliance, Britain devised a bold new strategy. Turning its attention to the colonial frontiers, especially those of western New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, Britain enlisted its Provincial Rangers and allied warriors, principally from the Iroquois Confederacy, to wage a brutal backwoods war in an attempt to cut the colonies in half, divert the Continental Army, and weaken its presence around British-occupied New York City and Philadelphia.
Moving quickly, British forces under the direction of Colonel John Butler and the charismatic Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant, unleashed a terror campaign, but following massacres in the well-established colonial settlements at Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Cherry Valley, New York, the Continental Congress persuaded General George Washington to conduct a decisive offensive to end the threat once and for all. Brewing since 1777, the "Year of the Hangman," the conflict between the Iroquois and colonists would now reach its deadly climax.
Charging his troops "to not merely overrun, but destroy," Washington devised a two-prong attack to exact American revenge. The largest coordinated American military action against Native Americans in the war, the campaign shifted the power in the east, ending the political and military influence of the Iroquois, forcing large numbers of loyalist to flee to Canada, and sealing Britain's fateful decision to seek victory in the south. In Year of the Hangman: George Washington's Campaign Against the Iroquois, historian Glenn F. Williams recreates the riveting events surrounding the action, including the checkered story of European and Indian alliances, the bitter frontier wars, and the bloody battles of Oriskany and Saratoga, in order to tell the tale of the campaign that changed the outcome of the American Revolution.
Glenn F. Williams is Historical Operations Officer at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, DC. He also served with the National Park Service Battlefield Protection Program and was curator of the U.S.S. Constellation.
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Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture
Author: Peter Applebom
In “one of the best portrayals of the South in years” (Washington Post), the Atlanta bureau chief of the New York Times travels from catfish farms and neo-Confederate gatherings to casinos and country music festivals and examines the reasons behind the region’s growing influence. Index.
Paige Williams
Peter Applebome plays the flip side of a tired old tune in Dixie Rising. Instead of adding one more book to the bulging section on the South's homogenization, Applebome aims to show how the region's bedrock ideals are in fact driving modern America. "Only the blind could look at America at the century's end," he writes, "and not see the fingerprint of the South on almost every aspect of the nation's soul."
Applebome, a New York Times correspondent in the South, finds in the region the roots of a whole slew of cultural trends -- a flourishing national conservatism, the racial preoccupations of national politics, a wildfire addiction to country music, the obsessive gun debate, and the spread of states' rights groups and of Southern Baptist outposts. Though his thesis isn't entirely original (John Egerton tried first, with The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America in 1974), the concept is intriguing.
The book's most convincing chapters are on race, country music (a regional business turned $2 billion mega-industry) and politics, particularly George Wallace. Despite a surprisingly forgiving tone, Dixie Rising depicts Wallace as the politician who "tapped into the fears and resentments of white America in a way that has defined the political landscape" -- making a strong case that without Wallace's mobilization of that angry, alienated, working-class constituency, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress might never have happened.
Yet in other areas, Dixie Rising doesn't quite build the bridge. What promises to be a cohesive portrait of the South's ongoing influence often reads like historical rehash. Other sections are merely self-indulgent profiles of places that Applebome finds interesting, rather than significant contributors to the American scene. In spots, Dixie Rising isn't much more than Applebome reaching. Some might explain that he's just another outsider seduced down the well-traveled path of an enduring mystery, one impossible to simplify. Applebome describes one man who "got Southernized" -- which is a bit like saying moving to Paris makes you French. You're either Southern or you're not; you can marry into it or move into it, but no amount of deep-fried osmosis can make you of it.
Dixie Risings value is that it forces us to think about the South's role in modern America and whether Applebome's perception will hold true: "We all need a calm in our storm, divine or otherwise. In ways both real and illusory, the South these days seems to promise one." -- Salon
Publishers Weekly
By turns seduced and repelled by Southern politics and culture, former longtime New York Times Atlanta bureau chief and transplanted Yankee Applebome grapples engagingly and appreciatively here with the stunning contradictions of the modern South. Not only does the South exercise disproportionate political power (Dixie now claims leadership of Congress as well as the White House); most of our serious conflicts over race and religion continue to play out dramatically in the old Confederacy. Applebome's unusual historical literacy helps him understand a region drenched in the tradition and legends of the Civil War, racist demagoguery and the battles over integration. Outsiders will be astonished by the new popularity of the Confederacy. Southerners black and white will recognize themselves in portraits of Selma, Ala., then and now, Nashville's music, South Carolina firebrands, Southern Baptist conventions and the saga of George Wallace. Above all, it is race that saturates Southern life. Because the author zeroes in on race and lets Southerners tell their own stories, this is a compelling, disturbing, at times inspiring book. As he stresses, no place in the U.S. has been so defined by raceand "the racial scapegoating... that crippled the South for so long will do the same thing for the nation." Photos. (Nov.)
Library Journal
Since the 1970s, a persistent theme in both academic and journalistic writing on the American South has been the presumed "convergence" of the politics and culture of the South with those of the non-South. Writers have also debated the question of whether this convergence is primarily a product of an "Americanization" of the South or of a "Southernization" of the non-South. Although New York Times journalist Applebome shows influence in both directions, his subtitle makes it clear that his focus is the South's influence on the rest of the nation. The author relies heavily on travels and interviews he did in the South over a period of 18 months starting in early 1995. Although he is a perceptive writer on matters pertaining to Southern culture and values, Applebome's understanding of Southern politics is not always as insightful. For public libraries.Thomas H. Ferrell, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette
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