DOC New Zealand Army Uniforms and Clothing 1910-1945 by Barry O'Sullivan; Matthew O'sullivan in History

Description

This sweeping historical narrative chronicles events instrumental in the painful birth of a new nation from the Bloody Morning Scout and the massacre at Fort William Henry to the disastrous siege of Quebec; the lopsided Battle of Valcour Island; the horrors of Oriskany; and the tragedies of the Pennsylvania Wyoming Valley massacre and the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition s destruction of the Iroquois homeland. Caught in the middle of it all was the Mohawk River Valley. Through 1763; culminating with the French Indian War; a series of colonial conflicts between the French and British raged along the North American frontiers. In the Province of New York; French intrusions were turned back with great loss of blood and treasure at places like Lake George and Ticonderoga; while Mohawk Valley towns were raided; plundered; and sometimes; as with Schenectady; virtually wiped off the map. In the American Revolution; patriots wrenched the Mohawk Valley from British interests and the Iroquois nations at fearsome cost. When the fighting was over; the valley lay in ruins and as much as two-thirds of its population lay dead or had been displaced. But by not holding this vital inland waterway the gateway to the West; the river between the mountains America might have lost the Revolution; as well as much or all of the then-poorly-defined province of New York. Oriskany; Cherry Valley; Cobleskill; Canajoharie; German Flats; Unadilla; Andrustown a line of battle sites and destroyed settlements; colonial and Native American; smoldered the length of the Mohawk Valley by war s end; all the way to the Finger Lakes region where the great towns of the Seneca Indians lay in ruins in the wake of Washington s reprisals for the Wyoming Valley raid. The fury of the war increased year by year in the Mohawk Valley; escalating to total war and near-genocide. It didn t have to be that way. Streaming with colonial traffic; the Mohawk River Valley earlier in the 18th century had become a place where the core ethnic groups of an emerging nation Native Americans; Palatine Germans; Scots-Irish; Dutch; English; and Highland Scots met in commerce and partnership and relative peace and security. Then; wrenched apart by brutal political partisanship; the very social and cultural diversity of the Mohawk corridor made the upheavals when they finally came as violent and pitiless as anywhere.