7 Questions with Don Hagist, Editor of the Journal of the American Revolution

 

DON N. HAGIST is managing editor of the Journal of the American Revolution. An expert on the British army in the American Revolution, he is the author of many books and articles, including Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution (Westholme 2020), The Revolution's Last Men: The Stories Behind the Photographs (Westholme 2015), and British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution (Westholme 2012).

1.          How and when did you get  hooked on history?

I grew up in a house full of books on all subjects, and got interested in many things. Among the history books, those that I found most compelling were personal accounts, either autobiographical or biographical, that talked about individual people doing interesting things. Large-scale events become much more interesting and relatable when viewed from the perspective of how people experienced them.

2.          What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

People have a nature predilection towards collecting things - coins, salt and pepper shakers, autographs, or what have you. There's a sense of pleasure in finding things that you've decided for yourself that you need, just because they happen to interest you. Seeking and finding bits of historical information, and seeing how they fit together, satisfies that compulsion for me, to accumulate related things and try to fill in gaps in the collection. It's like working on a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, where you have to find each of the pieces, and you don't know what the picture looks like.

3.          How does history play  a part of your professional life/career?

I'm an engineer for a medical device company, developing robotics products for orthopedic surgery applications. That doesn't sound related to history, but I apply the same rigor to historical pursuits that I apply to engineering: find as much data as possible, and focus only on what the data actually tells you. From the other direction, history informs me about human experience and how people respond to situations, which helps to understand human factors in product design.

4.          Why is studying/knowing history important?

Everything about the present, both natural and artificial, has been shaped by the past. While it is impossible to know everything from the past that influenced or shaped a given person, object, or event, the basic understanding that these influences exist helps deepen our appreciation for whatever in the present we're dealing with. No one knows "history", of course; instead, each of us knows some specifics aspects of some tiny part of history, but no matter what it is, it helps us understand the world around us. Nothing simply exists in isolation - every personality, every procedure, every arrangement of objects became that way because of events and decisions in the past.

5.          What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

There are many that could be favorites if there were enough time to learn about them all. I've chosen to focus on the American Revolution, specifically the lives and experiences of British soldiers who served in America in the 1770s and 1780s. That sounds like a very narrow focus, but for me it's trying to find detailed information on more than 50,000 people - where they came from and what they experienced. We think of armies in terms of large, homogeneous numbers, but every person in that army was an individual with their own life story.

6.         What is the Journal of the American Revolution and what is your role?

Journal of the American Revolution is an on-line magazine focused on the American Revolution and America's founding era, roughly 1765 through 1805. We publish articles that tell about people and events of this period, based on primary sources, with the emphasis on presenting only the information that can be verified through original documents. There's a lot of fanciful exaggeration and outright mythology about this era, some of it well-meaning with an intention of filling in the blanks of an incomplete historical record; we strive to cut through that and show what is known and unknown about this important time period.
The publication was founded at the beginning of 2013; I joined as an editor part way through that year, and am now the managing editor. JAR is a subsidiary of Westholme Publishing, which has an extensive catalog of books on the American Revolution era as well as other history books.

7.      Tell us about your book Noble Volunteers and how you came to write it?

Noble Volunteers: the British Soldiers who fought the American Revolution describes the people who made up the rank and file of the British army in America from 1774 through 1783 - the sergeants, corporals, drummers, fifers and private soldiers. The book tells about how they were recruited, trained, paid, lived, ate, worked, played, fought, suffered and healed, with an emphasis on diversity rather than commonality. Every single person had their own story, and we don't know them all, but the book will show that there is no single answer to questions like "why did men enlist?", "where did soldiers live?", "how deadly were wounds?" and so forth. Besides providing a detailed picture of the varied experiences soldiers might have, the book also clearly demonstrates that the war in America was not lost due to any deficiencies in the capabilities of the soldiers, but instead through difficulties of logistics, poor strategy, and an overall lack of understanding by the British government of how to cope with a popular rebellion in a distant colony.
Signed copies of the book are available here: https://www.booksq.com/order-noble-volunteers-don-n-hagist