Memory Wars

Named a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleMemory Wars explores how commemorative sites and patriotic fanfare marking the mission of General John Sullivan into Iroquois territory during the Revolutionary War continue to shape historical understandings today. The 1779 expedition was planned and ordered by General George Washington. It was a massive enterprise composed of four forays involving thousands of men who were sent on a scorched-earth campaign, obliterating nearly sixty Iroquois and other Native villages, including homes, crops, and stored foodstuffs. For Indigenous residents it was a brutal invasion. For settlers who eventually moved onto razed village sites, it meant land and fortunes beyond measure. The Sullivan Expedition has long been fixed on the landscape of Pennsylvania and New York by a cast of characters, including amateur historians, newly formed historical societies, and local chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Asking how it is that people continue to "celebrate Sullivan" in the present day, Memory Wars underscores the symbolic value of the past as well as the dilemmas posed to contemporary Americans by the national commemorative landscape.