The 2025 Society of the Cincinnati Prize has been awarded to Vaughn Scribner, Ph.D., for his book Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

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.

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 is an associate professor of British American history at the University of Central Arkansas. He received his Ph.D. in early American history from the University of Kansas.

Watch Dr. Scribner's presentation on his book