Nobody Men

“In this thorough and engaging study, those who remained neutral during the American Revolution take center stage. Although they outnumbered the patriots, these ‘nobody men’ were forgotten after the revolutionary war. Glasson restores them to their rightful place in history.”—Wim Klooster, author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History “In using one family’s archive to narrate their predicament, Glasson makes a major intervention in the study of the War for America/War of Independence, revealing a group of men and women who were neither Patriot nor Loyalist but occupied a middle ground between these two poles or shifted between them as occasion or necessity arose.”— David J. Hancock, University of Michigan   “During the American Revolution, perhaps half of George III’s former subjects chose to remain neutral.  In Nobody Men, Travis Glasson tells the fascinating story of one of the most important straddlers, the Crugers of New York.  Merchants with ties to the West Indies and England, the family’s travails remind us that the war for independence was also a bitter civil war, one whose history Glasson brings to life in this fresh and vivid account.”— Eliga Gould, author of Among the Powers of the Earth:  The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire