Maureen Taylor
Images of the Revolutionary War Generation
From the publisher
A remarkable work of documentary history, The Last Muster is a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographic images―primarily daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and carte des visite paper photographs―of the Revolutionary War generation. This extraordinary collection of images assigns faces to an un-illustrated war and tells the stories of our nation’s founding fathers and mothers, updating and supplementing research last collected and published over a century ago.
In her comprehensive introduction, author Maureen Taylor explains how she came to this project and collected the images. She also describes her exhaustive primary source research involved in dating and identifying each image and investigating the story and genealogy of each subject. The array of seventy images is expansive and includes veterans, loyalists, Native Americans, African Americans, children who witnessed battles and aided soldiers, and women who nursed the wounded and even took up arms themselves. Although the faces that gaze at the reader are old and wizened, the stories they tell are of youthful bravery in the young days of the republic.
The Last Muster is a much-needed contribution to the history of the American Revolution, the early Republic, and the history of photography. Through these portraits and the accompanying narrative, readers will have the opportunity to relive the Revolutionary War.
We’ve had numerous History Camp Author Discussions about the Revolutionary War, including . . .
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Friederike Baer — Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War
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Alexander R. Cain, JD — Lexington in the First Year of the Revolutionary War
[Broadcast on September 10, 2020 and rebroadcast on July 2, 2026; recorded earlier.]
Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective®, is the author of author of The Last Muster: Images of the Revolutionary War Generation and The Last Muster, Volume 2: Faces of the American Revolution, plus a look at her new project, Old Providence. She is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada. She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira). She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. She is a contributing editor of Family Tree Magazine.
