Masquerade

Alfred F Young

ISBN 10: 0679441654 / ISBN 13: 9780679441656

Published by Random House USA Inc, 2004

About this Item

In Masquerade, Alfred F. Young scrapes through layers of fiction and myth to uncover the story of Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who passed as a man and fought as a soldier for seventeen months toward the end of the American Revolution. Deborah Sampson was not the only woman to pose as a male and fight in the war, but she was certainly one of the most successful and celebrated. She managed to fight in combat and earn the respect of her officers and peers, and in later years she toured the country lecturing about her experiences and was partially successful in obtaining veterans' benefits. Her full story, however, was buried underneath exaggeration and myth (some of which she may have created herself), becoming another sort of masquerade. Young takes the reader with him through his painstaking efforts to reveal the real Deborah Sampson in a work of history that is as spellbinding as the best detective fiction.

Seller Inventory # 00109849996

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Masquerade
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679441654
• ISBN 13: 9780679441656
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

The remarkable story of the woman who fought in the American Revolution as Robert Shurtliff–and got away with it.

Serving for seventeen months during the period between the British surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the final treaty, a time when peace was far from secure, Deborah Sampson accomplished her deception by becoming an outstanding soldier. Alfred Young shows us why she did it and exactly how she carried it off. He meticulously reconstructs her early life as an indentured servant; her young adulthood as a weaver, teacher, and religious rebel; and her military career in the light infantry–consisting of dangerous patrols and small-party encounters, duty that demanded constant vigilance–followed by service as an orderly to a general at West Point.

Young also examines her postwar life as a wife–Mrs. Benjamin Gannett–and mother on a hardscrabble farm in southeastern Massachusetts, her collaboration with Herman Mann on the book that made her a celebrity and sent her on a pathbreaking yearlong lecture tour through New England and New York in 1802—03, and her relentless and partially successful quest for veterans’ benefits. He looks, too, at how Americans have dealt with Sampson in public memory and have appropriated her for a number of causes over the past two hundred years.

Throughout we are aware of the historian as detective, as Young carefully sifts through layers of fact and fiction to reveal a fascinating, complex, and unusual woman who lived in an era that both opened opportunities to and imposed limitations on women.

About the Author

Alfred F. Young is Emeritus Professor of History at Northern Illinois University and Senior Research Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 2000, the Organization of American Historians honored him with its Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, We the People (with others), The Democratic Republicans of New York, and has edited numerous other volumes.