Reproduction of the original: Historical Record of the Eighteenth or The Royal Irish Regiment of Foot: From its formation in 1684 to 1848 by Richard Cannon

Protecting the Empire’s Frontier tells stories of the roughly eighty officers who served in the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot, which served British interests in America during the crucial period from 1767 through 1776. The Royal Irish was one of the most wide-ranging regiments in America, with companies serving on the Illinois frontier, at Fort Pitt, and in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with some companies taken as far afield as Florida, Spanish Louisiana, and present-day Maine. When the regiment was returned to England in 1776, some of the officers remained in America on staff assignments. Others joined provincial regiments, and a few joined the American revolutionary army, taking up arms against their king and former colleagues. Using a wide range of archival resources previously untapped by scholars, the text goes beyond just these officers’ service in the regiment and tells the story of the men who included governors, a college president, land speculators, physicians, and officers in many other British regular and provincial regiments. Included in these ranks were an Irishman who would serve in the U.S. Congress and as an American general at Yorktown; a landed aristocrat who represented Bath as a member of Parliament; and a naval surgeon on the ship transporting Benjamin Franklin to France. This is the history of the American Revolutionary period from a most gripping and everyday perspective. An epilogue covers the Royal Irish’s history after returning to England and its part in defending against both the Franco-Spanish invasion attempt and the Gordon Rioters. With an essay on sources and a complete bibliography, this is a treat for professional and amateur historians alike.

While much attention has been paid to the commemoration of conflict in the twentieth century, this book is the first to consider conflict memory in the long term, arguing that modern practices were not created out of the mud of the trenches, but evolved from much longer practices. From the fourteenth century to the present day, this work analyses the changing commemoration and memories of British battlefields at home and overseas, from Bannockburn (1314) to Bosworth (1485) to Basra (1914-1921). Across these seven centuries, there have been a series of recurring post-battle rituals that have shaped and continue to shape memories of conflict. Three distinct but overlapping periods of memory can be delineated: In the later Middle Ages battlefields were consecrated by the burial of the fallen and often by the erection of a battlefield cross, or chapel or chantry to pray for the dead. The second phase began with the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s, when pilgrimage and prayers for the dead was abolished, and battlefield chantries were dissolved and many battlefield crosses were demolished. Memories shifted from the dead to the living, especially the bodies of surviving veterans who commemorated the conflict by their wounds, and from soil and stone to print and ink. The third phase began in the eighteenth century when antiquaries and others established new monuments on past battlefields. Monuments to survivors and the dead were established on contemporary battlefields such as Waterloo, once again hailed as sacred ground hallowed by bloodshed, fit destinations for a pilgrimage. Not just officers but ordinary soldiers began to be memorialized by name on the battlefield, culminating in the cult of the names of the dead enshrined by the creation of the War Graves Commission in 1917, and the idea that battlefields should be preserved unchanged as seen in modern heritage management. Drawing on a wide variety of literary and historical sources and taking a uniquely longue durée approach, the book explores and links memory-making practices from across the period to reconsider the ways in which battlefields are commemorated and re-commemorated. In so doing, it makes a unique contribution to a wide range of historiographical fields: British history since the fourteenth century, memory studies, heritage studies, landscape history, conflict archaeology, and military history.