Material culture in the American Revolutionary War?

by BraveChewWorld

Hi /r/AskHistorians. I'm working on trying to further my understanding of material culture during the American Revolutionary War, especially amongst the Loyalists. I'm trying to find something a bit more accessible than pure archival records, something along the lines of Jim Mullins' Of Sorts for Provincials which is a treatment of a similar topic during the French and Indian War.

Any leads /r/AskHistorians?

LordKettering

The best place to start is with The Collector's Illustrated Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. It's more than a bit dated, and there have not been enough revisions to it over the decades. Having said that, it's an excellent collection of images and brief descriptions of every kind of extant artifact from the period: cookware, textiles, metalware, ceramics of all sorts, weapons, and so on.

The Collector's Illustrated Encyclopedia will give you a baseline to work from. Some of the artifacts (especially the spectacles) actually fall outside the time frame: too late or too early. But all of them are ballpark.

From that baseline, you'll want to then focus more specifically on what sort of material culture interests you. To narrow this down, I'd jump into the prolific website: The Eighteenth Century Material Culture Resource Center. It's a constantly updated site with lots of slideshows that examine specific occupations or types of artifacts.

It sounds to me that you're interested in the militaristic material culture of loyalists. To that end, I'd recommend grabbing yourself a copy of Osperey Publishing's American Loyalist Troops 1775-1783. It's a great introduction to the topic, with uniform illustrations and a few extant artifacts.

Other general guides I'd recommend to military material culture would be Don Troiani's Soldiers of the American Revolution and Neumann's Battle Weapons of the American Revolution.

Hope that helps!