Loyalists and Community in North America

This book is the first collection of Loyalist scholarship to span the 13 independent states and the Florida and Canadian provinces that remained loyal to the Crown in the American Revolution. The Loyalists disrupted the colonial communities in which they lived in ways that helped define the Revolution. Loyalist garrison towns became a pathological environment of violence and suspicion, which brought out the worst in patriot, British, and Loyalist behavior. In Canada, Loyalist exiles tried to create model Anglo-American communities, but in the end had to jettison Loyalist ideology to claim a new British North American identity.