Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
November 2024
Since the Revolutionary era, American women have played vital roles in defending our country. We know Abigail Adams made ammunition. Deborah Sampson, a former indentured servant, disguised herself as a man and joined a Massachusetts regiment in 1782. Stitching her own wounds, she was not discovered until, unconscious, she was taken to a hospital. She received a state military pension. In colonial militias, wives frequently followed their husbands. In addition to domestic roles, they fought on the frontline. The name “Molly Pitcher” identified women like Margaret Corbin, who carried buckets of water to cool cannons before reloading. In the Battle of Fort Washington, she was shot three times, earned a pension and was buried at West Point.
In the Civil War, more than 1,000 women on both sides disguised themselves as men to fight; others were spies. Driving her medical wagon onto battlefields prompted Clara Barton to found the Red Cross in 1881. Dorothea Dix, an advocate for improving care for the mentally ill, was Superintendent of US Army Nurses, insisting on medical training for 3,000 Union women.
Editor’s Note: Michael Luo is the Executive Editor of The New Yorker and the author of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, from which portions of this essay was adapted.
In the fall of 2016, I was standing in the rain with my family and some friends, in front of a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, when a woman brushed past us, evidently aggravated we were in her way. Partway down the block, she yelled, “Go back to China!”
For a moment, I was stunned. Did she really say that? l abandoned my younger daughter in her stroller and rushed after the woman. We exchanged words, and when I walked away, she screamed, “Go back to your fucking country.” Because I could think of nothing else, I said, “I was born in this country!”
It was the biggest event in recent memory for New York City, and the “metropolis of the New World” outdid itself to honor the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria’s oldest son, in the first visit to America by a member of the British royal family.
Editor’s Note: Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, classics professor and prolific author. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson’s most recent book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, from which this essay was adapted, looks at examples in the past of civilizations that were destroyed, reminding us that societies are not immune from the horror of wars of extinction and the erasure of an entire way of life.
Editor’s Note: Curtis Wilkie is a retired professor, journalist, and historian of the American South who was the longtime Southern bureau chief for the Boston Globe. Historian Douglas Brinkley observed that, “Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.” Wilkie is the author of numerous books including Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South and Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians, and Other Persons of Interest: Fifty Pieces from the Road, where a version of this essay first appeared.
