Tories: Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC good afternoon hi I'm Abbi yochelson I'm a reference librarian in the main reading room which is part of the humanities and Social Sciences Division and behalf of the humanities and Social Science Division I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Congress I see we have lots of outside people here so we had good publicity to bring you in the humanities and Social Sciences Division offers an ongoing series of book talks and programs like this in a huge variety of subjects because humanities and Social Sciences is pretty broad it covers just a lot back in 2005 I had the pleasure of introducing Thomas V Allen and his co-author Paul Dickson to speak about their Bonus Army march buck and Tom is a regular here at the library we see them in the main reading room all the time but I also see staff from different reading rooms I know he's used manuscripts geography and math prints and photographs so so we're always glad to see him because he's always working on some interesting topic and about a year ago I I found him in our computer catalog Center and I asked what he was working on and he was very excited telling me all about the tories and the great information he had found in archives in Canada and in England and I thought it sounded like a great program for us to do and he promised as soon as the book was out he'd come back and did the book talk so the book was just out about two weeks ago just came out so the Press Club got him first but he's he's right starting his book speaking someone called me last week to inquire about this program and I happened to mention that he had also written a book on the Bonus Army March and that caller said wow that's really great a historian who can actually work in different eras try different time periods and I thought well you know you could peg him as a historian his specialty is kind of a military history and intelligence he he got the New York Public Library picked his 2004 book George Washington's spy master as one of the best children's books of the year and remember Pearl Harbor was an American Library Association notable book in 2001 spy book the encyclopedia of espionage is a major source for the International Spy Museum downtown and you may have seen him on the History Channel's secrets of war program or on any number of other programs he's frequently interviewed on TV as kind of a military history specialist but it's really hard to peg him that way because I looked at the list of articles he's been writing many many articles for years for National Geographic the Washington Tony in Washington Post magazine Smithsonian so yeah there are a lot of articles on world war ii but then as you start to read there are a lot of articles on china and then you get to things like bird books for birding articles and and then you find things like shark attacks and inventors and discovers so this is a if you can't call him a renaissance man at least a renaissance writer in terms of the breadth of coverage before becoming a freelance writer tom was a reporter columnist and feature writer for several newspapers managing editor Chilton books and associate chief of the National Geographic society's book service he's also a founding board member of the writer Center located in Bethesda and I know a number of you here are affiliated with that but I think the really great thing is he served two years in the Navy early on in his career because he's a very popular speaker on the national Geographics expedition cruises so I think it helps him get his sea legs on those cruises his time in the Navy so sure's Weekly described Tory's as Alan's third research and fast-paced narrative provide fresh ways of thinking about the Revolutionary War and she had new light on the lives of those from bankers to small tradesmen who remained loyal to the throne in the face of vigorous opposition and persecution this little quote came out before the book was published he's been getting rave reviews since it's been published Wall Street Journal and elsewhere following the presentation Tom will be happy to take questions and be we're pleased that the library Congress is doing a webcast of this production also c-span book TV is here filming so if if you ask a question it's quite likely you're giving implicit authority for them to to film you or at least her voice as well so Tom well if you get it introduced by a reference librarian who knows it all thank you I'm not supposed to have to plug the Library of Congress but it's inevitable a few years ago I got a call from an historian at the CIA whom I admit when I had been working on the George Washington book about intelligence in the Revolutionary War and he says the Library of Congress is something it might be interested and call this number and I thought wow I mean maybe the CIA really does that people who you know just like in those seven days of the Condor the people reading books all the time so well it wasn't quite that what had happened was the library had got a manuscript that had been written by a Tory in Connecticut during the Revolution who was under house arrest for his Tory thoughts and he decided he would write his own history of America particularly the Revolution and he his name was constant Tiffany and in the manuscript he he gives a look at why he was a Tory is kind of folded into some other elements in the in the revolution well the point about it was I found it right here and it wasn't that I found it it was found for me which is what happens this is a wonderful place to work that was one of the objects that started me going on the book I had an editor one time who said don't tell me how you got this story just write this story turn it in and I usually follow that but there are some really elementary I was about to say interesting but I had another editor who says no I tell you it was something interesting you don't tell me anyhow they I started looking around at at the idea of of a book on the Tories and but I dismissed the idea because John Adams said that you can't write a good history of the American Revolution because certain records are absolutely missing they don't exist and one was the records showing why the Tories became Tories and what the British were doing to encourage the the existence of a Tory element in in the American colonies and the other set of records that he said we're impossible to find were the records of what the rebels did to the Tories and that's kind of an intriguing because he just sort of leaves it there well I I decided I would start doing some other things and I would and as Abby said I come in here and find elements for it but everything was sort of moving toward a book on the somewhere in the 18th century I thought of the Scot Irish and I did a proposal a book we proposal and an editor who saw it said well this is all very interesting but why not do a book on the Tories there hasn't been one written in a long time so that was it and it did become a quest for records and what what I and the records were all over the place a lot of them here a lot of them in Canada because that's where a lot of the Tories went and there were records in England and there were records in the State Archives there wasn't any country yet so there couldn't have been much in the National Archives but in the State Archives for instance in Delaware it's a bloodthirsty set of of folders in what they call their treason file because they declared that if you were a Tory and you did anything that looked like it was going to be raising arms against the rebellion you could be hanged well that was the beginning of the discovery that one of the reasons we don't well I was trying to find out why is that we don't know much about Tories I mean I had read a lot about the 18th century in George Washington and so forth and I couldn't really understand why they were standing out there and they weren't being covered well two things came to mind one was when when when we were in Ireland my wife Scottie and I she as I said in the acknowledgments her hand is actually on these versions of Xerox machines where we were copying documents and I could see her hand so her hand was literally involved in the research of this book but we we were in Ireland and we met an Irish historian and I was telling him about working on this subject and how little there was available at least at first glance and he said well every country has a grand story and they developed that grand story and things fall away and they go underground and they aren't seen and I think your Tories are probably there and the underground somewhere and that was that was a great insight and then the other thing I discovered was that there's a there was a tremendous brutal vicious bloody atrocious fighting that went on in that underground and nobody really liked to talk much about that either and temper Aeneas Lee so we started trying to find a way to get the idea across and here's one exercise which I found myself doing I had written a book for young adults on Valley Forge and I sort of went back in my mind and said okay here's George Washington and the remnants of the Continental Army starving to death no shoes dying and deserting by the dozens and 20 miles away is Philadelphia and in Philadelphia the occupying forces of the British Army are having a grand time they're not starving to death at getting three meals a day and more remarkably when you poke into it a little bit more you find that the there's some eyewitness accounts of the British coming into Philadelphia the British Army Congress had skedaddled short time before Liberty Hall is going to have a British flag flying over it in a few minutes and as the British come into Philadelphia the the streets and lines was cheering people when the British start settling in that some of these cheering people go to the British and say would you like to know where the rebel leaders are and they take the British around and the rebel leaders have put into a jail in Philadelphia well that's the other side of Valley Forge that the reason it was a Valley Forge one of the reasons certainly was that there was a great deal of hesitation to openly support the Continental Army in a lot of areas of America and a lot of time during the revolution and that was not much of a discovery but it was it gave me a kind of insight and I started looking at things a little more deeply and it turned out that so many loyalists by some estimates 80,000 and other estimates a hundred thousand somewhere in that range left the United States of America because they were Tories they called themselves loyalists but we called them Tories we Americans and that's a funny thing to say I realized very early in the game I couldn't use the word Americans very easily in this book because everybody's an American they if you go back to about eight 1760 everybody's a Tory essentially they're all British subjects they are they're seeing the king as the the man whom they're going to worship every Sunday if as most of them were they were Anglicans they're going to pray for the king and they their wherewithal there's only one trading partner and that's England and that's the way things were but as the revolution started to percolate and the Sons of Italy at the sins it really Wow where where am I the Sons of Liberty started functioning in Boston and in New York things started to change and a group started to question the Revolution for a while it was a political debate I came across a club that was formed in Plymouth in the it was formed in 1770 or 71 gotta look it up it's in the book and it was called the Old Colony Club it was founded primarily by descendants of the met passengers on the Mayflower I mean there wasn't a better American pedigree than to say you're descended from the Mayflower well a lot of the people who defend descended from the Mayflower in in the generation of the Revolution were Tories well they found they formed a club and they decided that they would celebrate the landing from the Mayflower a year they didn't call it Thanksgiving they just said they would have a big dinner at the colony Club the Old Colony Club and by about the third year they there are people in the club who are starting to think I want to be a Tory I want to be a rebel and what happens finally is the Sons of Liberty in 1774 seventy five say that there isn't going to be anymore Colony Club Voltron tea club in Plymouth we're going to take that stone that the pilgrim said they stepped on no proof of it by the way but there was a stone even then said was the stepping stone supposedly there were people who said I'm descended from the woman who whose foot touched that stone and she was brave enough to come ashore so they took the stone and got a lot of oxen a lot of strong lads and in Plymouth and they started lifting the stone into a car the idea was they were going to take it to the center of Plymouth and under what was then a Liberty pole flying from from the Liberty pole is any one of several flags that represented the revolution and when they take the stone out it splits and they left one part in the ocean and took the other part into Plymouth and that was the first idea that they they they talked about that splitting of the stone because they were seeing what was going on if go back to come to considered Tiffany's manuscript he is very outraged by the revolution on religious grounds he says that the Sabbath is being violated again and again by the rebels that we're there had only been good there is no evil he sees it more and religious basis for this other people saw other reasons and I I felt that I couldn't really go into the reasons that much because there seemed to be an individual reason for each person the other thing is that it was an historian in the early 19th century who was trying to round up information about loyalists and he produced a biographies of hundreds of them and he said he wished he could have found more but that if you have been defeated in a revolution if your land has been taken away if you have terrorized people and you have been terrorized yourself you don't do much writing about your experience well there was a journal that I came across right here by a man named Stephen Sharpton Stephen was tells he writes a journal when he's in maturity but he starts it with the the the first news coming in from Lexington and Concord reaches Danbury Connecticut a few days after the shot heard round the world and he's an eighteen year old kid and he decide and he has a girlfriend and named Amelia and he joins the rebel militia the rebel militia is his is the captain of the rebel militia is one of his uncle's his father is a Tory father throws him out of the house he says took me by the arm and threw me out of the house so he stays in the rebel militia for a short time and then thinks better of it and he does something that hundreds of people of young men and some families did eventually if you look at what happens early in the Revolution when the when when the Continental Army loses the Battle of long I Long Island becomes a a stronghold for Tories it's a magnet for anybody who lives on the other side of Long Island Sound all the little towns along the Fairfield County shoreline are called Tory towns by the by the rebels because all you have to do is get in the boat enroll or sell or sail across Long Island Sound get to Long Island and the British will welcome you with open arms and you will find yourself among friends so hundreds of people go across and one of them is Stephen when he gets there he Stephen Jarvis enlists and the Americas Queen I'm sorry the Queen's Rangers Queen's Rangers is one of a hundred and fifty or more at least 150 military units formed by Tories to fight not just debate fight other Americans who are rebels and if you want if you follow Stephens Journal one of the first remarkable things about it is the journal is called an American's experience in the British Army he's not in the British Army he's in a Tory army unit that was formed by Tories in New York and it will fight alongside or independent of the British Army but it's not the British Army but that when that when that just like what happened with with Tiffany's manuscript the manuscript for Jarvis's journal was found in a trash can and published in 1907 in 1907 we didn't want to think of the Revolution as anything but the revolution and we couldn't use the term civil war because we had had the north-south real Civil War only a generation before so the whole term Civil War kind of goes away and so does the idea of Tories well anyway Jarvis goes to war he fights in battles all all the way from New Jersey down to California and Florida he kills Americans and writes about it well he can't do when the war ends he's been in the natori military regiment and had seen plenty of battle for seven years he comes back to Danbury Connecticut wearing his green loyalist uniform the loyalists frequently when they got outfitted by whoever recruited them wore green uniforms to distinguish themselves from the Redcoats so he walks into Danbury and he expects he's going to marry Amelia and then they'll settle down in Danbury and when you read that Charlie you say wait a bit Stephen this isn't going to happen they decide what they're going to do is have a relative who's an Anglican clergyman that he will have the clergyman marry them in the local Anglican Church what Stephen doesn't know is all the Anglican churches were closed during the revolution because Anglicans started there their services by praying for the king and if you're praying for the king you're in trouble you can wind up in jail or maybe under house arrest like like consider Tiffany or there was also a copper mine up in Connecticut and there if you went down a couple hundred feet and into the copper mine there were little cells there and you might wind up there so he comes back to Danbury and finds that the Anglican Church is closed they get themselves at a minister and he marries them and a mob comes to the house he talks the mob down and then the next day today after his wedding the local sheriff crashes into the bridal chamber and says get out of town what he didn't know is that if you had taken arms against the Contin against the rebels in a newer from Connecticut you were subject to treason and hanging so eventually he and his wife they tried to stick it out as long as they can but they're threatened and they finally go to Canada with their infant child and when I started looking at the Canada Canadian Exodus what's happening is the British want the loyalists to stay here but the loyalists start to feel the urge to get out and one reason they want to get out is because they are losing their land the confiscation of land was consistent through the Revolution every every one of the states passed some kind of a law about confiscation and there were also laws that were charging him with treason well what what they do is go to Canada because with the British see the benefit of getting a group of hang of english-speaking British subjects up into Canada to counteract those people in Quebec who were Catholic and speak French so the whole area of what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick becomes the homeland of the people who left America and they are given axes army rations some tents in some cases lumber and other cases told to cut down the trees and start some some communities which they do and they're very proud of it today and if you're a descendant of one of the loyalists who came up there you can put a ue after your name it's United Empire that they had they had helped preserve the Empire and if you want to know what the Tories wanted and what their intention was if they had won just look at Canada that whole steadfast character that we talked about in Canada the Canadians tell you that came from the fact that they were founded by non revolutionaries people who really kept their heads about them and and they had gone up there and started the kind of country that they wish we had had down here Parliament constitutional monarchy and freedom of speech all the little freedoms we have if we look to Canada as kind of cousins then you now you can look at Canada as even more so these are the people who didn't want revolution and the people who did want the revolution pretty obviously won but I think that one of the legacies that the the Tories had and it's a legacy we can feel sort of tremors about today is that no matter what you do there is dissent in some cases violent bloody murderous dissent inside we the people in the first generation of politicians in America supposedly learned that and I guess the lesson continues till today so that's the Tories on a kind of philosophical plane maybe some questions about the blood and the hangings and well no it what what happens is you can see references first of all there's the little matter of the war of 1812 a lot of the sons of loyalists come across the border and and if we had the roster of who burned Washington I think we'd find some names of some of their names among them so once you get the war of 1812 which essentially New England said we don't we're not interested in those are the New England's war of 1812 refused to send militia so in in New England yeah they're coming back now they're coming back to what they're coming back to not having their farms anymore they have to start it all over again but you find references of the son of a Tory marrying the daughter of a rebel and vice versa so it starts to recover and in particularly in there was a lot of celebration of this in Massachusetts particularly I mean here's the center of it all and it becomes the center of reconciliation there's no retribution to speak of we not the French Revolution and the safety valve really turned out to be Canada I think if there hadn't been a Canada I mean we'd still be in revolution probably yo get the the Tories here and there particularly I mean one example well William Franklin the son of Ben Franklin had been the royal governor of New Jersey and he is arrested for being a governor essentially and put in jail he escapes and he winds up in New York which was of course under British occupation throughout the war and starts up a guerrilla organization which is operating outside British hierarchical control British Army is kind of upset about it and they actually do use the word terror and they they they write ours on rebel houses as an indication that you can do anything you want to anybody in that house is it's a rebel this is basically in New Jersey and it gets to be called the neutral ground kind of ironically because there won't be any armies there but there are loyalists and and rebels fighting each other on a guerrilla basis so yeah that that if you look at the the revolution kind of microscopically you see about seven hundred and some-odd battles and skirmishes and five hundred and some about five hundred and fifty of them involve Tory military units the most dramatic one is in Kings Mountain on the North Carolina South Carolina border where there are about nine hundred rebels who have been rounded up to fight a Tory unit called the American Legion and which is commanded by a British officer named Ferguson eventually a battle takes place there were a thousand Tories and nine hundred rebels and when the battle is over the rebels win and it's it's vicious they they they will not honor the flag of surrender they started hanging people and nobody on that field was anything but an American except for one British officer and it's kind of to me symbolic of the fact that you can't really talk about Americans when you're writing in this war you got to call them something because they were all Americans you know what the British really expected strategically that if they could take the south they could stop the revolution it was just you know essentially they're all of the southern colonies would become British and it would starve out or destroy the revolution and and they put great hope in in the loyalists that were there one of the problems they had was they they didn't do anything strategically the British Army didn't want to cooperate very much with the Tories who were and there was a caste a class issue involved in my opinion the other thing that it happened is very early in the war the royal governor of Virginia declared that any slave going over to the British would be given his or her freedom and a lot of those former slaves went on to fight for the British not just a lot of them were called pioneers and they would build fortifications and do jobs but there was one regiment called the Ethiopian regiment and then across the front of the uniform it said freedom for slaves when and so this dampened southern loyalism because especially by the ruling class because they were seeing so many slaves go over to the British at the end of the war when the loyalists are going to Canada the about 3,500 slave ex-slaves go to Canada Canada are given land and and start a colony in in Canada just as a footnote to that about ten about ten years later they say we're not getting a good deal here in Canada getting lousy land we mistreated and they asked the British to send them to see it over Leone and essentially they formed the modern state of Sierra Leone it's another result of the revolution yeah Cowboys the the went one was the Cowboys and the the Cowboys got to be everybody for a while but there were there were green coated Raiders and I forgot the name that they had but moat but one of the low footnotes to history is that when when Andre is leaves Benedict Arnold after having obtained the defense of West Point he's walking along at a British uniform the with a great coat on and he sees three nondescript soldiers and he assumes they're Tories and says I'm a British officer and they say well welcome to reality you know we're not so that's how that that's how mixed up it was in New West Jeffster yeah it was Delaney's cowboys delancy's Cowboys if you want to get out of here early don't bring up John Copley with me he is an incredible character he John Singleton Copley he he he he does a portrait of Paul Revere one day and another day he does a portrait of the British commander of the Redcoats in Boston and there's a wonderful little story he before looked before the revolution in a riot against the existing governor his name is Bernard the riot spills out and to the halls of Harvard and there's a portrait of a Bernhard in a Bernard in one of the halls and one of the rebels gets on somebody's shoulders I guess and he cuts the section out of the portrait that would have been where the heart was if it had been a human being and he holds up and said I've taken Bernards heart well Harvard calls on John Singleton Copley to repair the portrait since he had painted it and Copley shows up and he repairs it and from then on he's a marked man and he he leaves the country before the revolution starts and and becomes a member of the what it's called alloy loyalist Club in in London that's Copley although the Royalists oh yeah there was a lot of fluctuation there there were people in Georgia all due respect anybody here from George the record was six times which switch and everybody was aware of switching going on I mean when the when the loyalists just when the British decide how to reward loyalists for their service to the crown they have five categories and one of the categories is took up arms for the King that's a top category about getting down if you just all he did was dessert from the Continental Army to go over that's a lower lower ranking loyalist because but there were a lot of them and you're right about the royal governor's in the South were absolutely fighting for the British and doing all kinds of things to to further the British you know no I got to tell you I I know but well I even as we speak Amazon is sending me a copy because no because I wouldn't I didn't want to read any fiction about the Revolution I didn't want it to leak in to my head but I bet I've heard a lot about him of course and in fact I came across someone who whose family who when he was 14 years old his uncle presented him with a copy of the book and said we were always ashamed that we had tourists in the family but if you read this you'll understand why so this is yeah there's a I also ran into someone who's whose name was Harrison with one arm well stop and think I mean it's a misspelling when she went through her whole life saying no no it's just one hour because the Harrison family said the ones with the two hours were Tory's than the one with one arm were rebels and they want they've got two lineages and then it has this one hour difference oh I'm from Connecticut one of the reasons why loyalists came back down here there was very little arable Lane you're in Ontario and you go anywhere north to I mean that's the end of it yeah that's good move worst there's always that what's this Bay company you cut around the like super just the Canadian Shield the only way that you could get any arable farmland was to go so so 1820s they're all flying through Detroit that's a good they get what happens the yep in new in Nova Scotia there are so many there they cut miss they make the second province of New Brunswick and that is absolutely run by X by X American I mean X people used to live here yeah and they certainly well you you your testimony to I mean that this is this is the difference and and I was so struck by it when we were up there doing research on it and you know all john adams would be interested if some of the records you have come across he's the one who estimated that what's one third of he is accused of having it but it wasn't quite what happened but when you try to get the numbers you can go anywhere from 20 percent to forty or so percent of the populace was was either a Tory or sympathizer Tories I know a couple people who read the manuscript and then the book before it was published we're very surprised that we won difficult Tori versus loyal decisions oh yeah settlers oh it's again my one of my biggest files about that thick and it's the name of the file is numbers I was always trying to figure out how many of these that weren't how many of those there were enough Dutch notorious that they weren't there was a group known as the Dutch Tories and there was a schism in the Dutch Church and and the schism went right along the lines of Tory or rebel and they were focused in pretty much in up in New Jersey across from satin island in that area and there were a lot of them but they don't seem to have shown much of a profile in subsequent history you just see references to them when they're talking about contemporary raids in in that area but they oh yeah they were called the Dutch Tories yeah I'm sorry good yeah it if you look at the book cover there are two Indians on it and the the whole point of the of the of the cover is brittania stretching out her mantle to protect all the various kinds of Tories there were and she's protecting the Indians because the young the Indians want particularly along the New York Canadian border and Mohawk Valley were absolutely on the Tory side and they had been nurtured by the British ever since the French and Indian War the British had had something called the Indian Department and the Indian Department allied itself with with resident Tories and produced murderous raids along the Mohawk Valley Cherry Valley Wyoming Valley basically it was the I I stayed away from really plunging into that because it's it goes back to his very deep roots as to who was who and there were even debates at the time about whether the Puritans were essentially the origin of rebellion and that that there was a religious basis as Tiffany finds and other people did that that the the worship of the idea of a god of a king that had divine authority was all over the the revolution and they the Presbyterians would not take an oath to the king and they get lumped in with the with the rebellion with the rebels and so when you see a church that's going to be burned down by rebels it's going to be an Anglican Church and if the church is burned down by the British or the Tories it's going to be a Presbyterian Church so yeah religion is there always and I mean not to go on and on but I mean I I I had a chapter I've worked on about religion and I couldn't get anywhere with it it was just too complicated for a narrative but for a special study it would be very interesting yeah they the accusation is all over the place that they claimed it though well we don't want to fight because we're Quakers but in reality they were profiting by literally profiting in Philadelphia from being on the Tory side when when the British leave Philadelphia and it's now being run under a military governor Benedict Arnold he he fights the idea that they're going to have a massacre of Quakers when that when the rebels come back into Philadelphia there are a lot of private grievances that they want to settle and and Arnold is against him because he's becoming Tory ask at this point it's marrying up marries is auditory girl and and they finally hang to to traitors right after the reoccupation of Philadelphia by by the rebels and they're both Quakers well we'll see if this sounds familiar we're going to send some soldiers over to train the Tories and the soldiers will we'll fight and go forward and behind them they leave behind the Tories nitori's will govern the areas where the British have swept through and won the day well it doesn't happen primarily I mean there's what there's one one book on the Southern Strategy that really focuses very hard on this they they underestimated the the number of people who would stand up and say our matauri I've got a gun I'm going to kill somebody very a lot of them did that in fact the general green of the Continental Army says that he was amazed by the savagery he uses the word savagery and murders that he was seeing when the Tories and the and the rebels collide in the wake of the of the British so it just didn't work it was a good idea and it could have worked if the British had integrated their strategies more more closely see if this sounds familiar they couldn't get along too well with the native people so it never really came to be this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

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Keywords: library, congress, tories

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Length: 51min 56sec (3116 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2011

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[u/alllie]

Most Americans have learned the essential narrative of the American Revolution: Our Founding Fathers led proud Patriots to fight against British rule and ultimately prevailed. Rarely mentioned are the thousands of Tories, or Loyalists, who supported the British and fought to remain in their American homes as loyal subjects of the crown. Historian Thomas B. Allen contends the American Revolution was as much a civil war as it was a rebellion against the British.

Thomas B. Allen is the author or coauthor of more than 30 books on subjects ranging from espionage to exorcism. But his primary interest is history, especially military history,an interest that recently produced Mr. Lincoln's High-Tech War, which he wrote with his son, Roger MacBride Allen. The book was cited by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and selected by Voice of Youth Advocates Magazine as one of the best nonfiction books of 2009. Another recent book, published jointly by the National Geographic Society and the International Spy Museum is Declassified: 50 Secret Documents that Changed History, a History Book Club selection.