Life During the American Revolution: Resources for Students and Educators: Revolutionary New York

This guide offers research tips and resource suggestions for educators and students interested in the American Revolution.

• Who Should Use this Guide?
• Primary Resources
• Revolutionary New York
• Mapping the Revolution
• Early Newspapers and Periodicals
• Black Experience of the American Revolution
• Women and the War
• Indigenous People and the Revolution
• Queer People in Colonial History
• Resources for Educators

Introduction

As a center of commerce and a critical port, New York was strategically important for the British to control as a base of operations. From the summer of 1776 to the end of the war in 1783, British forces occupied the city, and New Yorkers themselves were bitterly divided between supporting the British and the Continental Army.

So what was life like for New Yorkers during the British occupation? Primary sources offer illuminating narratives.

Timeline of Events

New York played a central and imperative role in the American Revolution, and many battles took place in New York State, including:

1. Battle of Golden Hill, January 19, 1770

2. Capture of Fort Ticonderoga, May 10, 1775

3. Battle of Long Island, 1776

4. Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776

5. Battle of Fort Washington, November 16, 1776

6. Battle of Oriskany, 1777

7. Saratoga Campaign, 1777

8. Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783

NYPL Resources for New York in the Revolutionary War

NYPL has several compilations of key resources for researching New York and the American Revolution, including these blogs:

• New York and the American Revolution: Resources at NYPL
• Teaching American History with NYPL Digital Collections: Revolutionary New York
• The Battle for Brooklyn, 1776
• Dispossessing Loyalists and Redistributing Property in Revolutionary New York
• Evacuation Day: New York's Former November Holiday

Suggested Search Terms and Recommended Titles

Find resources in the NYPL Research Catalog by keyword searches or try the following subjects:

Or, try searching by specific battles and events:

• Saratoga Campaign, N.Y., 1777
• Fort Ticonderoga (N.Y.) > Capture, 1775
• Evacuation Day, New York, N.Y., 1783

Want to find these books at a library near you? Try searching WorldCat!

No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than New York City, the Hudson River, and the surrounding counties. Political and military leaders on both sides viewed the Hudson River Valley as the American jugular, which, if cut, would quickly bleed the rebellion to death. So in 1776, King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a grand rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada. George Washington and every other patriot leader shared the king's fixation with the Hudson.

On September 15, 1776, the British army under General William Howe invaded Manhattan Island, landing at an open field on the banks of the East River, roughly where the United Nations sits today. George Washington's Continental Army, still in disarray after its miraculous escape following the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn some two weeks earlier, retreated north to Harlem Heights, leaving New York in British hands. Control of the city was Howe's primary objective; located at the mouth of the strategically vital Hudson River, it had become the centerpiece of England's strategy for putting down the American rebellion. However, as Barnet Schecter reveals in his stirring narrative, far from furnishing a key to the colonies, New York proved to be the fatal albatross that strangled the British war effort.

The question of why New Yorkers were such reluctant revolutionaries has long bedeviled historians. In an innovative study of New York City between 1763 and 1776, Joseph S. Tiedemann explains how conscientiously residents labored to build a consensus under difficult circumstances. New Yorkers acted the way they did not because they were mostly loyalist or because a few patrician conservatives were able to stem the tide of revolution but because the population of their city was so heterogeneous that consensus was not easily achieved.Differences within the city's pluralistic population slowed the process of hammering out a course of action acceptable to the large majority. The consensus that finally emerged had to be cautious rather than militant in order to unite as many people as possible behind the revolutionary banner. Ultimately, the time it took was far less significant, Tiedemann notes, than the fact that New York proceeded to declare independence, and went on to become a pivotal state in the new nation. In framing his argument, Tiedemann explains the limitations of interpretations offered by both progressive, New Left, and consensus historians. Citing the work of scholars as diverse as Walter Laqueur, Theda Skocpol, and Louis Kreisberg, Tiedemann pays close attention to the dynamics of British colonial rule and its impact on New York.