Annual Booklist 2026 : Dr Alexander S. Burns
Alexander S. Burns is an Assistant Professor of History at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he specialises in the study of early modern military history, the Continental Army, and the Atlantic World. He edited the Festschrift for the late Professor Christopher Duffy, entitled The Changing Face of Old Regime Warfare, and won the 2025 SAHR Chapple Prize with his first monograph, Infantry in Battle, 1733-1783.
Matthew H. Spring, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)
In some political circles, the term ‘revisionist historian’ has taken on a derogatory meaning. Dr Matthew Spring amply deserves the term in its true, original sense: a historian who has done the necessary research work, in the archives, in order to change the public’s perception of period of history. Spring’s book, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only, fundamentally reshapes the story of the American War of Independence, by placing a fast moving, flexible, and tactically aggressive British Army at centre stage. In proportion to the tactical abilities of the American army, and the direct threat represented to the American people, its cities, and its government, man for man, Spring demonstrates, these British soldiers were the most dangerous opponents the United States has ever faced.
Christopher Duffy, Fight for a Throne: The Jacobite ’45 Reconsidered (Helion & Co., 2015)
In his second major coverage of the Jacobite 1745-1746 campaigns, Christopher Duffy crowned his career by exploring the strengths and weaknesses of both the rebel and government forces. While the book, like many of Christopher’s volumes, possesses its share of endearing idiosyncrasies, its coverage and utility as a guidebook for touring the campaigns of ’45 remain unmatched. Duffy’s knowledge of other European forces leads to much useful commentary on Continental influences on both the government and rebel armies.
Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-1763 (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
With this work, Stephen Brumwell rightly claimed the title of foremost tactical historian of the French and Indian War. In this penetrating archival study, Brumwell showed his mastery of tactical, social, environmental, logistical, and administrative history. The result is a triumph. Much as Matthew Spring would do for the American War of Independence six years later, Brumwell rewrote the story of the British soldier in the French and Indian War, demonstrating why Britain was victorious in this important theatre of global conflict. Throughout the volume Brumwell shows how the knowledge of tactical details in lesser-known engagements, such as the Battle of La Belle Familie (1759) or Sainte-Foy (1760) can reshape the false perception that British soldiers were unprepared for war in the Americas.
Friederike Baer, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022)
If I could be permitted to sneak in a volume related to British warmaking on the whole, rather than the British Army as an institution, Friederike Baer’s recent volume on the Hessians provides a timely reminder. Throughout much of the modern history of Britain and the United Kingdom, the Redcoats have often fought alongside continental allies: this is as true in eighteenth century as it was in the twentieth, and remains today. The German soldiers who fought alongside King George’s troops constituted between a quarter and a third of the overall British commitment to North America in the American War of Independence. Dr Baer’s new study, the first major archival treatment of the Hessian Subsidientruppen in forty years, shows these men as they were. Their officers were well-read and intellectually curious, something of the ‘fighting naturalist’ familiar to British audiences as a result of a 2003 film. The enlisted men were devout Protestants, often singing hymns on the way into battle, though mercifully, as one British officer noted, they had less of a ‘yankee…twang’.
Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Having already stretched a bit to include the Hessians, I must now beg the pardon of the Society’s members once again, as I include a book on social history. Why does such a book deserve inclusion on a list like this? In The Ends of Life, Keith Thomas explores how early modern English men and women sought fulfilment. For men, one of the major pathways to success, fulfilment, honour, and dignity was through military service. In the book’s second chapter, Thomas explores both the ideal of a masculine soldier in early modern England, and also how the mercantile values of the eighteenth century were beginning to erode that ideal. In addition to being an important reminder of the importance of soldiers in societies which often do not value them, it is an ironic lesson that some of the greatest triumphs of British arms came at a time when the value of soldiering itself was in question. Here, Roberts gives us a profound lesson, both for the early modern past, as well as the post-modern future.
Fortunately for younger scholars, the archival work of exploring the Georgian Army is far from finished. Adding my voice to those of Kevin Linch and John Houlding, artillerymen, in Britain and beyond, remain an understudied topic (perhaps as a result of their small absolute number). Likewise, there is much remaining work to be completed on the status of enlisted men, the Tommy Atkins, of the eighteenth century. Although historians such as Andrew Cormack ('These Meritorious Objects of the Royal Bounty’: The Chelsea Out Pensioners in the Early Eighteenth Century) have done excellent work in exploring the lives of these men, particularly later in the century, much research remains to be completed. Authors, particularly Americans, who write on the Georgian enlisted man treat him in isolation, writing on the experience of the British Army in one war, rather than the second half of the century as a whole. One of the great tragedies of scholarship on the Georgian Army is that the PhD thesis of Glenn Steppler, 'The Common Soldier in the Reign of George III, 1760-1793', was never published so as to be commercially available for a wide audience. Ilya Berkovich and Sascha and Katrin Möbius have done much to address this gap in the armies of Continental Europe. Hopefully, a rising generation of British scholars will finish this work for the Georgian Army.