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    Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier
    Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier
    Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier
    Audiobook13 hours

    Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier

    Written by Alfred F. Young

    Narrated by Kate Mulligan

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlackstone Publishing
    Release dateSep 12, 2023
    ISBN9798212171687
    Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier
    Author

    Alfred F. Young

    Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is assistant professor of religious studies at Stanford University.

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    • 4/5
      That was a lot of facts smooshed into only 300 or so pages (as an aside I'm not sure I've ever read a book, even a historical non-fiction one, with so many notes in the back).The book was about Deborah Samson Gannett of Massachusetts, on of the most well known women to disguise themselves as a man and join the Continental Army. Not the only one, but one of the most successful. And, this book, unlike a lot of the other works about her, this was about her entire life, birth to death, not just one part, like her speaking tour, or her time in the army.On the whole it was a good book, though a bit wordy. I really love that the author found out that, using Deborah's spelling her her diary during her speaking tour and a few of her letters that she may have had quite the Mass. accent. (Pahk the Cah, will ya, of course, they didn't have cars yet, so that may be a bad example of the accent, hers was more like she spelled audience with an o... etc.)But, I didn't love it all. Even though here and there the author sort of barely allows that Deborah may have flirted with or had a relationship with a woman or two, he repeatedly states that it's totally and utterly 'improbable'. But, that's heteronormative HIStory for you. Although, to be fair to this author, Deborah Samson's original biographer Herman Mann was even worse, wildly vacillating between depicting Deborah in more 'animal love' (not platonic love) situations with women to 'lalalalala' she couldn't even physically have sex with another woman 'lalalala'.Maybe she was straight, maybe she wasn't, but while in his final chapter the author gives sixteen paragraphs to whether or not she was a person of color, he only gives five to whether or not she had any same sex relationships. More HIStory.So, a good book, sure, and the author obviously put a ton of research into it, but not a great book.