Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence

Abstract

Ken Miller’s Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence provides a case study of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during the American Revolution and investigates how an ethnically diverse town faced the wartime pressures of hosting British and German prisoners of war and in turn emerged with a united American identity. Utilizing local archives, military and political records, and engaging with a growing historiography in frontier Pennsylvania and prisoners of war during the War for American Independence, Miller contributes to our understanding of the conflict in the American interior and in the everyday lives of the revolutionaries. An associate professor of history at Washington College, Miller argues that while residents of Lancaster tended to local security and oversaw the detention of hundreds of prisoners, their position as a crossroads, both ethnically and spatially, resulted in a mixture and exchange of differing cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives that transcended their communal attachments. Lancaster’s German, Scots-Irish, and English populations became invested in a larger, communal struggle, and residents increasingly identified with distant friends and allies in a shared sense of patriotism and as Americans.