As the world prepares to commemorate this coming Saturday’s 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, new historical and archaeological evidence and analyses are allowing both academics and the public at large to more fully understand how and why the American War of Independence was even more violent than often popularly believed.
Research over the past few years has shed new light on the massacres, ethnic cleansing and extreme maltreatment of prisoners that occurred during the war.
Although most western European conflicts of the 18th century (such as the Wars of Spanish and Austrian Succession) were on much greater scales, they had much lower atrocity rates.
The American War of Independence was particularly atrocity-prone because it had a unique combination of features: it was an anti-government insurrection, a civil war and an ethnic conflict all combined into one particularly brutal war.
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