July 28, 2025
The American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati is pleased to announce that the 2025 Society of the Cincinnati Prize has been presented to Vaughn Scribner, Ph.D., associate professor of British American history at the University of Central Arkansas, for his book Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America, published in 2024 by the University of North Carolina Press.
The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as marking the birth of American republicanism and representative democracy. In his original research, Vaughn Scribner illustrates how this could not have been further from the truth for tens of thousands of European troops who ventured across the Atlantic. Collecting first-person accounts and researching foreign soldiers’ negative perceptions of the American environment, Scribner reveals harsh wartime realities and the considerable physical and psychological anguish of British and German soldiers. This is a study where icy harbors, uncrossable rivers and sudden floods are a part of the Revolutionary landscape.
Under Alien Skies is both an account of the American environment and a study of how new realities met foreign soldiers’ expectations. Those who fought in America under the British flag came to see themselves as strangers in an unfamiliar land. Revolutionary America bore little resemblance to the idyllic vision championed by republican propagandists. Instead, the War of Independence unraveled into a mire of anxiety, devastation and hardships wrought as much by the land itself as by combat. As a work of environmental history, Under Alien Skies is a step toward understanding how the American Revolution was shaped by the environment, both the climate and geography, of North America.
“Vaughn Scribner brings to light an underappreciated but fascinating aspect of the American Revolution,” says Andy Morse, executive director of the Society of the Cincinnati. “America’s landscape in the late 1700s was anything but a halcyon environment, as the wild ‘up-country’ started almost immediately at our shorelines. Our European cousins must have surely thought they had found not the stairway to heaven but the highway to hell!”
The Society of the Cincinnati Prize is the premier award for scholarship bestowed by the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, Inc. Established in 1989, it is presented annually to the author of an outstanding book that advances understanding of the American Revolution and its legacy. Honorees have included leading historians as well as rising scholars in the field.
The Cincinnati Prize is made possible by a gift from the family of the late H. Bartholomew Cox, Ph.D. Previous honorees include Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West (1989); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1995); Saul Cornell, The Other Founders (2001); Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana (2004); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground (2007); Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots (2013); Eric Hinderaker, Boston’s Massacre (2018); T. Cole Jones, Captives of Liberty (2020); and Friederike Baer, Hessians (2022).