Temple professor Travis Glasson will discuss his book, “Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties and Family in the American Revolution” at the township library.
The Mullica Hill library will hosts Temple University professor Travis Glasson on Thursday, April 30, at 7 p.m. to discuss his latest book, “Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties and Family in the American Revolution.”
The book is about a trans-atlantic family, the Crugers, who are neither loyal to the British nor supportive of the American patriots during the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War. The story focuses on the family’s efforts to live amid great conflict and change in the new world.
Glasson specializes in Colonial American and British history and uses that knowledge to help tell the family’s tale.
“At least one third of the Colonial population were neutrals during the American Revolution, yet they have rarely been featured in narratives that shape our ideas about the conflict,” said the library’s head of adult services, Andrew Brenza. “By following a single trans-atlantic family, historian Travis Glasson puts neutrals – the “nobody men” – at the center of this tumultuous period’s history.”
The book also features notable figures of the era like Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and John Jay.
“Especially interested in the 18th century,” says Glasson’s biography on the Temple University website, “some of his recent research examines the American Revolution as an imperial civil war through the histories of the many people in North America, the Caribbean and Britain who were neutral or otherwise ‘in the middle’ during the conflict.
“Although active in the pre-war Colonial resistance movement,” the site adds, “most of the Crugers were neither ardent ‘patriots’ nor committed ‘loyalists’ once the empire’s Constitutional conflict turned into a shooting war, and their stories crystallize some of the dilemmas and decisions faced by those in the middle.”
Glasson has also published “Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World,” which focuses on British Christian missionaries hoping to convert free and enslaved black people to Christianity in British colonies such as America.
The library wants to educate people on a part of the Revolutionary War that is often overlooked, with help from a Rev250 grant from the New Jersey State Library to fund the Mullica Hill library’s commemoration of the 250 years since the start of the war.
This event and others require advaance registration on the library sysrem website.
