Areas of Interest: 

• American Revolution
• Warfare in the Western World

Research and Teaching: 

My research, over the past few years, has dealt with the reading preferences of eighteenth-century British army officers.  What books on war did those officers prefer?  What might those books tell us about the officers, their development as soldiers, and the wars that they waged?  This research will come to fruition this fall with the publication of Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2010).  Beyond that, I have been and continue to be interested in, the relationships between theory and practice of eighteenth-century warfare.  I have explored those relationships in a number of essays that I am drawing together for a book.

I am currently teaching a freshman seminar (Thomas Jefferson and the Uses of the Past), directing one dissertation, and reading another three or four dissertations in early American and United States history.

Selected Publications: 

• Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution, (Univ. of North Carolina and The Society of the Cincinnati, 2010).
• John Peebles' American War: The Diary of a Scottish Grenadier, 1776-1782, (Sutton, UK and Stackpole, 1998).
• The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (Atheneum, 1972; Univ. of North Carolina, 1974; W.W. Norton, 1975).
• Warfare in the Western World: Military Operations since 1600 with Robert A. Doughty et al., 2 vols. (Lexington, Mass., 1996)