Will I love Independence Lost?

Reading Independence Lost made the American Revolution, something I’d been studying and teaching about for twenty years, feel startlingly new—and I recommend it to everyone so they can feel its magic for themselves.

It’s no wonder it won so many prizes! What’s captivating is how deftly Kathleen DuVal shifts the focus away from the familiar sites in Boston and Philadelphia to the Gulf Coast, revealing a world of Native nations, Spanish governors, free Black strivers, and Creole merchants all swept up in their own fights for independence—and all defining ‘independence’ differently. 

What about the rest of North America? Stories of the American Revolution in other parts of North America have often focused on the colonies that didn’t rebel—the lack of Revolution in Nova Scotia or the failed Continental conquest of Quebec (surely the source of one of history’s greatest counterfactuals)—and which never became part of the United States. As such, there is a way in which such stories, while framed as looking at might-have-been, inevitably explain how things turned out the way they did, explaining part of the creation of the United States and/or of Canada. 

But DuVal looks elsewhere—to the… show more.

You might or might not have read about Alexander McGillivray, the controversial Creek diplomat, but how about Payamataha, Oliver Pollack, Petit Jean, Amand Broussard, or James Bruce? They were, respectively: Chickasaw leader who tried to keep his people out of the war; merchant and the Continental Congress’s agent in Louisiana; slave from Mobile who spied for Spain; Cajun militiaman seeking revenge against the British for deporting his people; member of His Majesty’s Council for West Florida. Weaving her narrative around this diverse cast and little-known cross-cultural encounters in the Gulf region, DuVal explores “the changing power dynamics of the entire… show more.