| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sarah J. Purcell. Sealed With Blood: War Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. Pp. 278. $35.00.

Sarah J. Purcell's thoughtful and engaging book explores the political history of American Revolutionary War memories in the early republic. Purcell is particularly interested in examining "how Revolutionary War bloodshed legitimized the American nation by providing a specific focus for Americans' self-fashioning" (p. 7). Her desire to show how the new nation was "sealed with blood" leads her to focus on debates over the meaning of heroes and heroism from the American Revolution while tracing the transformations in "public memory" about revolutionary soldiers and warfare. In terms of military remembrance, she argues that, by the Jacksonian period, a more "democratic" public memory largely, if not totally, displaced a "republican" memory of the war. Not only were common soldiers hailed as heroes, but their voices found increasing representation in the public sphere. As Purcell puts it, "Public memories of the Revolutionary War spread to ever widening socioeconomic groups, who adopted the language and style of commemorations to their own political uses—a process I refer to as the democratization of public memory" (pp. 2–3).

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