In Masquerade , Alfred F. Young scrapes through layers of fiction and myth to uncover the story of Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who passed as a man and fought as a soldier for seventeen months toward the end of the American Revolution. Deborah Sampson was not the only woman to pose as a male and fight in the war, but she was certainly one of the most successful and celebrated. She managed to fight in combat and earn the respect of her officers and peers, and in later years she toured the country lecturing about her experiences and was partially successful in obtaining veterans’ benefits. Her full story, however, was buried underneath exaggeration and myth (some of which she may have created herself), becoming another sort of masquerade. Young takes the reader with him through his painstaking efforts to reveal the real Deborah Sampson in a work of history that is as spellbinding as the best detective fiction.

The eleven original essays presented here serve to enlarge the canvas upon which American history is to be portrayed so that it will allow—or more deliberately, give more prominence to—those groups at the bottom of colonial society to gain more equitable visibility. The effect is a striking view of the Revolution that provides not only a much-needed perspective on the role of minority groups in an era of social upheaval but also presents a panorama of such complexity and vitality that American history itself becomes more meaningful and more exciting than anything we have heretofore imagined.