| Portion of title |
Settlers and natives remember Washington's Sullivan Expedition of 1779 |
| Contents |
Yankee Insurgency and the Battle of Wyoming -- Patriotic Women Celebrate Sullivan -- Pennsylvania's 1929 Sullivan Series -- Ambivalent Festivities and the Newtown Centennial of 1879 -- Inventing "Sullivan-Clinton" for New York -- Celebrating Sullivan in Indian Country -- The 1929 "Pageant of Decision" -- A Tale of Two States -- Dueling Celebrations -- Pennsylvania -- New York -- Changing the Narrative -- Haudenosaunee Historical Consciousness. |
| Abstract |
"Memory Wars is an ethnographic study that explores how commemorative sites marking the journey of General John Sullivan into Iroquois territory during the Revolutionary War and related activities--plaques, street names, museum displays and massive patriotic fanfare--continue to shape historical understandings"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Abstract |
"Memory Wars explores how commemorative sites and patriotic fanfare marking the mission of General John Sullivan into Iroquois territory during the Revolutionary War continue to shape historical understandings today. Sullivan's expedition was ordered by General George Washington at a tenuous moment of the Revolutionary War. It was a massive enterprise involving thousands of men who marched across northeastern Pennsylvania into what is now New York state, to eliminate any present or future threat from the British-allied Iroquois Confederacy. Sullivan and his men carried out a scorched-earth campaign, obliterating more than forty Iroquois villages, including homes, fields, and crops. For Indigenous residents it was a catastrophic invasion. For many others the expedition yielded untold bounty: American victory over the British along with land and fortunes beyond measure for settlers who soon moved onto the razed village sites. The Sullivan Expedition is significant in northern Pennsylvania and New York state, where it has been fixed on the landscape by a cast of characters, including amateur historians, newly formed historical societies, and local chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Asking how it is that people continue to "celebrate Sullivan" in the present day, Memory Wars underscores the symbolic value of the past as well as the dilemmas posed to contemporary Americans by the national commemorative landscape."-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| LCCN | 2022049629 |
| ISBN | 9781496206961 |
| ISBN | 1496206967 |
| ISBN | (epub) |
| ISBN | (pdf) |
