The purpose of this thesis is to examine in selected tales and romances Hawthorne's intent and the effectiveness of his transmutation of American colonial and Revolutionary War history in his fiction. This study examines the most important of Hawthorne's original sources. While indicating the relationship between fictional and historical accounts as necessary to a study of Hawthorne's romantic transmutation of history, this thesis further investigates Hawthorne's artistic reasons for altering events of the past.

Though the American Revolutionary Army is often portrayed as a crucible of national feeling, this study of 169 diaries reveals that Revolutionary soldiers barely understood, or accepted as part of their community, large parts of the country for which they fought. The diaries include journals of ordinary soldiers, officers, and camp followers, and demonstrate the largely overlooked significance of soldiers’ physical environment in shaping their world-view. Typically episodic, often filled with random and apparently mundane detail, and occasionally dark with deep sadness and melancholy, diary writings reveal soldiers’ definitions of who belonged to the national community. Military historians of the Revolutionary War have long culled important details from various diaries, with the goal of constructing a synthesis of relevant narratives into a single history. In many ways, this project does the opposite. Instead of fitting soldier diarists into a single linear narrative of the war, it looks at how soldiers fought their war and understood its landscapes by creating a variety of sometimes complimentary, sometimes conflicting, personal and group narratives. The purposes and conventions that defined soldiers’ descriptions of land, architecture and people they encountered reveal their motivations for fighting, definitions of just violence, and hopes for victory. In turn each of these factors shaped their understanding of their war and the community for which they fought. This thesis follows American soldiers’ problem of understanding their new country through three chronological phases of the war. In the early years of the war, as American strategy focused on cities, soldiers struggled to protect themselves against the perceived immorality of city life. By blaming cities for their losses, soldiers developed a dark set of justifications for destroying civilian landscapes. In the mid war, the use of landscape description as a weapon intensified as both armies increasingly turned to scorched earth policies. As the campaigning turned south late in the war, northern soldiers guarded themselves against a landscape they perceived as inherently unhealthy. In their depiction of these places, soldiers used their diaries as tools to protect their bodies and souls, and contemplate American landscapes they often found foreign. / History

George Washington's role in the American Revolution has not been lost in the mists of time, but most modern Americans have lost touch with his actual character and style because of the immense cultural changes that have transpired since the eighteenth century. However, by examining the duties of Washington throughout the Revolutionary War from four different perspectives a more holistic interpretation of Washington during America's fight for independence may be gained. This study examines the relationships Washington had with Congress as well as with his fellow officers and troops. Particular attention is paid to the manner in which Washington led the army, in addition to how he was perceived by his contemporaries at large. The goal of this thesis is to achieve a holistic interpretation of Washington's tenure as Commander-in-Chief, which will enable a better understanding of why Washington was and continues to be perceived as a symbol for American independence.

This dissertation studies the intersection of knowledge, culture, and power in contested coastal and estuarine space in eighteenth-century northeastern North America. It examines the interdependence of vernacular pilot knowledge and directed hydrographic survey, their integration into practices of warfare and governance, and roles in assimilating American space to metropolitan scientific and aesthetic discourses. It argues that the embodied skill and local knowledge of colonial and Aboriginal peoples served vital and underappreciated roles in Great Britain’s extension of overseas activity and interest, of maritime empire. It examines the maritimicity of empire: empire as adaptation to marine environments through which it conducted political influence and commercial endeavour. The materiality of maritime empire—its reliance on patterns of wind and current, on climate and weather, on local relations of sea to land, on proximity of spaces and resources to oceanic circuits—framed and delimited transnational flows of commerce and state power. This was especially so in coastal and riverine littoral spaces of northeastern North America. In this local Atlantic, pilot knowledge—and its systematization in marine cartography through hydrographic survey—adapted processes of empire to the materiality of the maritime, and especially to the littoral, environment. Eighteenth-century British state agents acting in northeastern North America—in Mi’kmaqi/Acadia/Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, and New England—developed new means of adapting this knowledge to the tasks of maritime empire, creating potent tools with which to extend Britain’s imperial power and influence amphibiously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the open Atlantic became a maritime highway in this period, traversed with increasing frequency and ease, inshore waters remained dangerous bypaths, subject to geographical and meteorological hazards that checked overseas commercial exchange and the military and administrative processes that constituted maritime empire. While patterns of oceanic circulation permitted extension of these activities globally in the early modern period, the complex interrelation of marine and terrestrial geography and climate in coastal and estuarine waters long set limits on maritime imperial activity. This dissertation examines the nature of these limits, and the means that eighteenth-century British commercial and imperial actors developed to overcome them.