Militias, past and present

The recent militia standoff in Oregon has refocused attention on the political idea of the armed citizen. In this talk, Matthew McCormack will show that Britain and America had long traditions of amateur soldiering. The heyday of this was the eighteenth century, when America rebelled against the British Crown and the British maintained a huge part-time force known as the “New Militia” to guard against French invasion. Drawing on his new book Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford UP, 2015), he will think about the past and the present of the citizen soldier