A Book Disappears

I brought Ethan Allen: His Life and Times by Willard Sterne Randall with me on a Vermont retreat, planning to go through the index and read the interesting bits. I read the first 90 pages and then did the index thing. Why did I plan that kind of reading? Because I'd already read Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier by Michael Belliseles back when I was researching The Hero of Ticonderoga

I found Ethan Allen to be very similar to Revolutionary Outlaws in its treatment of the intelligent, unschooled, rough and tumble, bull-in-a-chinashop Allen. Both books, for instance, place him in the context of the late Puritan world he was born into and the impact that had upon him. Randall's book goes into more detail in places, regarding Allen's family history, for instance, and how he came to lose leadership of the Green Mountain Boys after leading them to victory at Fort Ticonderoga. But in what I read, I didn't feel there was much new ground broken.

What was particularly interesting to me was that in reading reviews of Ethan Allen I didn't see much in the way of references to Revolutionary Outlaws, even though it was also about Ethan Allen and his world and written by an academic and was published less than twenty years earlier. There were a couple of vague comments about only one major biography of Allen having been written in the last fifty years (Randall does this, too), which I assume is referring to Revolutionary Outlaws, but no name is given.

What happened to Revolutionary Outlaws, a book that got attention at the time of its publication and that I remember as being well reviewed?

Well, its author, the aforementioned Michael Belliseles, got into some big trouble for a book he wrote after Revolutionary Outlaws. Depending on which account you read, his research was called into question or he intentionally manipulated facts to support his points. The consequences for him were disastrous. His teaching and writing careers were destroyed.

What happened post Revolutionary Outlaws might make one question the scholarship of everything Belliseles did before that point. Still, given the connections between Revolutionary Outlaws and Ethan Allen, you'd think at least some reviewers of the newer book, who I assume were qualified to review this particular historical nonfiction, would have brought up the older one.

Instead, Revolutionary Outlaws seems to have disappeared.