| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joseph S. Tiedemann and Eugene R. Fingerhut, editors. The Other New York: The American Revolution beyond New York City, 1763–1787. (An American Region: Studies in the Hudson Valley.) Albany: State University of New York Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 246. $60.00.
Revolutionary New York's remarkably heterogeneous population fulfilled every aspect of John Adams's three-part assessment of the revolutionary populace. One group wagered everything to win independence from Britain; another took similar risks to defeat colonial insurrectionists; and a third hoped to survive the war by not joining either side. Although historians have explored how New Yorkers participated in the American Revolution, much of that work has focused on people who lived in New York City or Albany. Most New Yorkers, roughly ninety percent of the population at the time of the revolution, lived not in cities but in the countryside. To correct what they see as an imbalance in the historiography, evident in the literature on nearly every other northern state as well, the editors and authors of this collection study how the American Revolution changed the lives of people who inhabited the state's vast rural landscape. To be fair, historians have been studying the impact of the revolution on rural New Yorkers for some time. Indeed, all the authors in the collection have written on rural New York and the revolution, and they cite an extensive literature. This book, however, puts the stories of these regions during the Revolutionary War into a single volume.	1
The book is divided into three sections that move from the downstate region north to the Hudson Valley and, finally, to the far reaches of the state. In the first, Edwin G. Burrows, Joseph S. Tiedemann, John G. Staudt, and Phillip Papas describe the revolution in Kings, Queens, Suffolk, and Richmond counties. In the second, Jacob Judd, Thomas Wermouth, and Stefan Bielinski examine events in the Hudson Valley. And in the final section, Robert W. Venables and Paul R. Huey outline the rebellion on the eastern and northern edges of New York. Even though most of the authors begin their narratives before 1763, they tend to adhere to a traditional periodization and follow the more conventional notion that the national revolution gave greater meaning and credibility to ongoing local movements even if they started before 1763 and ran long after 1787.	2
The essays follow a structural pattern. Before discussing their region specifically, each author outlines the geography of the county, enduring political alliances, and the racial, religious, and social make-up of the population. Not surprisingly, that populace was incredibly diverse, a characteristic the authors rightly highlight. For example, New Yorkers owned nearly nineteen thousand slaves when the revolution ended and, although some New Yorkers argued for immediate manumission, slavery persisted into the nineteenth century. Similarly, even though some Native American groups sided with the revolutionaries, at the end of the war they all faced a new colonial threat posed by the United States and the state of New York. But keeping with conventional time constraints prevents some of the authors from exploring fully how independence for some inhabitants of the region led to further subjugation and even extermination for others.	. . .

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