John Gilbert McCurdy is Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University, where he has taught since 2005. He is the author of Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution (Cornell, 2019), which was named 2019 Book of the Year by the Journal of the American Revolution. He also wrote Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States (Cornell, 2009). McCurdy received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. He has held fellowships from the British Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the University of Michigan.
BOOK REVIEW: Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America by Vaughn Scribner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024) $29.95 Paperback Historians’ interest in the environment has remade our understanding of the past in recent years. We are now more inclined to appreciate the role that […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Fevered Fight: A Medical History of the American Revolution, 1775-1783 by Martin R. Howard (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2023) Medical care was at the center of the Revolution. When the War for American Independence began, the British army summoned its physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and purveyors to tend to the men who sickened and […]
BOOK REVIEW: United for Independence: The American Revolution in the Middle Colonies, 1775-1776 by Michael Cecere (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme, 2023) In the American Revolutionary War, probably no period was more dramatic than the time between April 1775 and August 1776. It was then that the skirmish at Lexington and Concord grew into an all-out war, and […]
BOOK REVIEW: Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution by Eli Merritt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2023) In many ways, the history of the United States is one of union and disunion. From the Civil War to rumors of secession in the present, it has long been an open question of whether […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Sugar Act and the American Revolution by Ken Shumate (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme, 2023) In the leadup to the Revolution, several Parliamentary laws evoked the enmity of Americans and pushed them to declare independence. Usually the Stamp Act, Townshend duties, and Tea Act tower over the other laws as they elicited the most dramatic […]
BOOK REVIEW: 1764: The First Year of the American Revolutionby Ken Shumate (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2021) When did the Revolution begin? This seemingly simple question has been answered in a variety of ways over the last three centuries. John Adams thought it was effected in “the minds and hearts of the people” long before shots […]
