There was a lot of information in this book and though I may not have agreed with all of it I did know about some of it from other books that I have read Here though it mainly focuses on the people who were persecuted or hung, and some tard and feather by revolutionists who thought these people were still loyal to the crown of England. Like the civil war this did also come between some families the most famous being Benjamen Franklin and his son, his son later left for England. overall a good book.

ABANDONED

Thank you to NetGalley and Crown for this reader's copy. In exchange, I am providing an honest review.

I am a massive history enthusiast. Massive. Had I stayed in school I would have minored in History. Of course, a lot of the history I would have learned most likely would have been whitewashed so there's that - I would have just had to relearn everything anyway. But I didn't stay in school so instead of relearning a lot of our history, I'm learning it for the first time. This title was part of my learning the actual history, not the whitewashed nationalism crap we were fed in our primary and secondary school days.

This is a very thorough title. So thorough that I couldn't read much of it before it got to be too tedious. It is a dense read. That is not a criticism, just an observation. The part I did get through was enlightening, I had not learned those facts before. Things like what tarring and feathering actually did to a person, how the Patriots weren't as noble as our American history books want us to believe, and a few other things. But after two months of reading, and often choosing other things to read over this title, I decided to call it quits. I didn't feel like starting a new year with this book still open on my shelf.

I so appreciate the opportunity to read this title but it proved to be too dense for me.

Obviously given the subtitle, one should expect quite a bit of violence and bloodshed. We are talking about what became a whole war after all. But even so I was left with I can only describe as a 'yucky" feeling, almost like the violence was so utterly glorified in every excruciating detail. Much has been written about the Revolutionary War, so I get the authors are academics are looking for 'fresh takes', but this we could do without.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
I loved this book and sent the review in. Not sure if this means, it never arrived.
I cannot give specifics since I read it four years ago but it suddenly popped up on my list of books to review.
Very strange.
But It is the American Revolution and it is a good read.

An informative and somewhat heterodox view of the revolutionary war - convincingly characterizing it as a civil war replete with terroristic tendencies. While this may be common knowledge from an academic persoective, Hoock brings this to the lay reader interested in American history, where some of our challenges have antecedents, and ways to think 'harder' about our origins.

I had a hard time with reviewing this book. I enjoy reading historical accounts and I believed this book would be an interesting scholarly discussion of the American Revolution. It was certainly advertised as a fresh and thoughtful attempt to take the blinders off the typical view of the War of Independence as a staid and gentlemanly affair to reveal the violence and torture that was commonplace. The book unfortunately read like a well researched and heavily footnoted graduate thesis. It was fairly dry and I felt like I was reading a collection of anecdotes or stories about how terrible the Revolutionaries were towards the British Loyalists, rather than a treatise exposing the violence and cruelty of both sides of the conflict. It seemed as though the author was quite self-congratulatory for exposing the violence of the Revolutionary War which had been carefully covered up previously. Yet I remember reading from an early age how there were atrocities on both sides. I think most people, if pressed, would agree that War is brutal, horrible, and ugly; yet the author glosses over atrocities by the British and chooses to focus on the terrible behavior of just the Revolutionaries in a one-sided attempt to re-paint the War according to his own vision. I felt like this was not an entirely honest critique of the violence implicit in wartime during the Revolutionary Era, as it is so heavily weighted in favor of the Loyalists being the biggest victims in his story. While I would certainly recommend this to someone interested in the history of our nation, I would caution them that it is from a very specific viewpoint.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a thoroughly detailed & researched account of the American Revolution full of gritty and violent incidents. It also imparts the sense of chaos and desperation of the struggle for freedom from the oppressive and uncompromising domination of British rule. At times the subject matter was so violent that it was difficult to read and at other times the author so thoroughly researched his subject matter that it was a bit of a slog to plow through, but the wealth of information contained in this historic rendering of the struggles and atrocities committed by both sides and the tragic events that were consequent is a very deserving story. This is truly a rendition of events that had been glossed over by other accounts and provides a very insiteful academic study of the time and events.. I feel I have a stronger understanding of the absolute awfulness of this period - much different than was presented in history class in college.

This book is subtitled, “America’s Violent Birth,” for a reason. All wars are generally told in a way that leaves out the horror of it all. Maybe we don’t really want to know the truth about how we kill each other. The author, Holger Hoock, presents the Revolutionary War here in full glory, all acts of violence unabashedly depicted and described. Do we want to hear this? No. Do we need to hear this? Yes. Not one war escapes the revulsion of what a human being does to another. It can’t be ignored and Hoock doesn’t let us.

Quite an insightful read about the Revolutionary War of Independence. This is a part of history that truthfully you don't know about when you go to school. Great story.

Scars of Independence is both surprising and not surprising. Unless you are a serious scholar of the American Revolution, you are likely unfamiliar with the nature and degree of violence towards civilians, the treatment of prisoners of war, and the propaganda battle surrounding the violence. However, if you think about the wars that have occurred in your lifetime, especially civil wars in places like Syria, Libya, or the Balkans, the violence that occurred during the American Revolution does not seem so surprising or unusual.

It is interesting and amazing how well Patriot leaders were able to control the narrative and minimize or suppress the reporting of violence or inhumane acts by the rebel/Patriot army, militias and civilians, while highlighting (and sometimes exaggerating the behavior of the British military and Loyalists. It is also interesting that following the end of the Revolutionary War, both public officials and citizens appear largely to have embraced a narrative of the conflict that hid from public (and especially international) consumption, especially later generations, the violence perpetrated against British soldiers, foreign fighters, Native Americans, and especially the Loyalists. Victors write the history, and this can be seen in the dominant narratives of other wars, such as World War I, but with later wars, at least some of the abuses and depravities perpetrated by the victors are part of the established history.

This was a really well researched book and I’m glad I had the opportunity to read it. In my opinion it is a non-biased look at the American Revolutionary War. It highlights atrocities which occurred on both sides of the conflict, Patriot and Loyalist/British, and also the humanitarian feeling that both British and American individuals felt in response to the conflict. The author also includes the post war treatment of Loyalists who returned to their pre-war communities. A lot of the accounts are heartbreaking on both sides of the conflict. I recommend this book to everyone with an interest in American/British history.

I received a free copy from Net Galley for a fair and impartial rating and would recommend that this book belongs on every history buff/student's shelf right next to PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES and LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME.

Most history books make it sound like England spent years fighting with us over one ship-load of tea. This book, like those above, allows the reader to find a far more sensible and logical rationale for the conflict, leading to a far more satisfying sense of understanding.

This story pulled me in from the get go. I felt I was being pulled back to that time era and could smell and hear the cannons fire across the distance field. It was as if I was in the middle of the excitement and confusion of the battle that surround me. Loved this book.

Three stars for me because I was niever sure of the point.

War is violent always?

While starting slow the book picks up a little but the author never seems to grasp that SOMETIMES violence is the only answer and the RIGHT answer; hence you call it war. I say so-so on this one.

Highly readable and interesting account of American History. Would be a great read for history students. As a history teacher, I highly recommend it.

Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth was one of those books that I really wanted to become invested in and just could not. I thought the concept was interesting and the text thought provoking.

The book looks at the American Revolution as the first American Civil War because of the involvement and violence between American Loyalists and Patriots. I had never thought of the Revolution that way, but it makes sense once pointed out.

The book also looks in depth at the scale of the violence in the Revolution. While yes, it was a war and wars are violent, Scars of Independence focuses on specific acts of violence that took place against non-combatants, and how the violence escalated throughout the conflict.

As I said, the concepts were intriguing. And while I wanted to become invested, I found it difficult with the writing. I found the reading to be slow and at times monotonous. I finally had to put it down because I felt like I wasn't making progress. So for now, this book with reside on my DNF list. I have hopes of revisiting it in the future and progressing further.

Scars of Independence provides a needed corrective to the habit we have of glorifying war and especially viewing our own founding through rose-colored glasses. Hoock's book is a well-researched eye-opener on how both sides in the War of Independence used violence and propaganda about real or imagined abuses to try to swing opinions. War is a brutal thing and sometimes the best of men resort to brutality to further their cause, but such brutality always has a cost. While the British seem to get a bulk of the focus for their mistreatment of prisoners and the use of strategic violence, the founding fathers and the men who lead our rebellion are also called out. What I found most interesting was the first hand accounts shared by the people who felt the violence first hand. A good book for anyone wanting a fuller picture of the true cost of independence.

When the Mel Gibson movie "Patriot" came out in 2000, many reviewers complained that its depiction of violence in the Revolutionary War was unrealistic. I remember thinking the massacres and atrocities, such as the scene in which the British burned a church with women and children inside, just didn't happen. I'd been taught that soldiers fought with honor and bloodshed was kept to a minimum.

It turns out that Mel Gibson might have been closer to the truth than movie critics at the time. Professor Holger Hoock's new book, "Scars of Independence," is a revisionist history of the Revolutionary War focused on acts of violence. He shows that both Americans and, to a lesser extent, British have sanitized our understanding of the war to minimize the role of violence. In fact, rights violations did occur, and not infrequently. Even if the Revolutionary War seems tame compared to the horrors of the 20th century, it had its share of massacres, POW abuse, and rape.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Hoock's reexamination of the war is how much of the violence involved conflict between Americans rather than between Americans and British. Patriots set up revolutionary committees that would harass, steal property from, and even occasionally kill Loyalists. American Loyalists fought for the British army in significant numbers. During the Battle of Kings Mountain, the Patriot army faced an enemy force comprised primarily of Americans, not British. Hoock goes so far as to call the Revolutionary War America's first civil war.

Hoock does an excellent job of making the book both accessible to amateur readers and fresh enough for expert historians. Although readers would benefit from having some knowledge of the Revolutionary War before tackling this book, Hoock does an excellent job providing just enough background to make the book accessible to lay readers. Hoock's writing is clear and accessible. At the same time, even though I've read several books about the Revolutionary War, almost everything in this book was new to me.

At the risk of hyperbole, "Scars of Independence" is possibly the most important book about American history in recent years. It comes at a time when Americans increasingly find themselves questioning their national myths. At a time when some even wonder if Americans are headed towards another period of civil war, Hoock's analysis also shows that, to some extent, civil conflict is part of our founding story.

This book was definitely for the people who want to get into the nitty-gritty of the fighting during the American Revolution. Generally, people should assume that war is hell, but we do have a tendency to sanitize our revolution to a point where it seems as if the war ended and everyone was happy. Scars of independence definitely fills out the picture and brings life back into the American Revolution. This is done mainly through many stories of individual soldiers, commanders, and civilians on both sides of the war. This gives the book a huge strength, but really only for people who are looking for something that in-depth. Personally, I think this book was worth the read, but if you are looking for a bit more of a general overview, this will probably feel like a bit of a slog.