Journal of the American Revolution, the popular online magazine and annual book, today announced its 2014 Book of the Year Award winner.
The annual honor goes to the non-fiction volume that best mirrors the journal’s mission, which is to deliver passionate, creative and smart content that makes American Revolution history more palatable for a broad audience. That means the award is for a combination of meticulous, ideally ground-breaking research and well-written narrative that appeals to both scholars and non-academic readers alike.
Below is the award winner and two honorable mentions selected for the 2014 awards.
2014 Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year:
Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities During the War for Independence by Ken Miller (Cornell University Press, 2014). Miller masterfully presents a multi-dimensional study of the impact of prisoners on the community in which they were held. The book describes the experience of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the primary location for holding British, German and Loyalist prisoners captured by American forces during the war. Miller provides one of the best treatments of a complex topic, and delivers a volume that deserves a place on the shelf of every serious scholar of America’s transition from colonies to nation.
Honorable Mentions:
An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker (Knopf, 2014). Bunker tells a fresh story about what was going on in London during the lead-up to the American Revolution and he does so in a compelling fashion with lots of lively detail.
Inventing Ethan Allen by John J. Duffy and H. Nicholas Muller III (University Press of New England, 2014). Duffy and Muller help readers better understand Vermont’s most famous citizen and how contemporary society impacts historians, their writing and the need for critical historical inquiry.
For more information about the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award, please visit https://allthingsliberty.com/bookawards/.
2 Comments
Well deserved.
Check out C-span2.org for Nick Bunker speaking about his book “An Empire on the Edge…” The interview can be streamed.