Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution

Join us for a Lunch at the Library presentation from Travis Glasson who will be discussing his new book: Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution. 

The story of colonists who were neither loyalists nor patriots during the American Revolution, told through the experiences of one transatlantic family

At least one‑third of the colonial population were neutrals during the American Revolution, yet they have rarely featured in narratives that shape our ideas about the conflict. By following a single transatlantic family, the Crugers, historian Travis Glasson puts neutrals—the “nobody men”—at the center of this tumultuous period’s history.  

Like most neutrals, the Crugers prioritized peace above any specific constitutional arrangement and sought ways out of the military struggle. The Crugers were prominent among prewar defenders of colonial rights, and their experiences once the shooting started, in places including New York, the island of St. Croix, and London, reveal the complex dilemmas that confronted those in the middle during the violent upheaval. The Crugers’ dealings with each other—and with a cast of boldfaced names including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, Lord North, and George Washington—illuminate how some people looked to chart alternate courses through perilous waters. Based on extensive research in the United States and Britain, Nobody Men humanizes what it meant to live through revolutionary civil war and recovers little‑known but essential histories of how new nations formed as an older empire broke apart.

This event will take place on Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 12:00 p.m. ET in Benjamin Franklin Hall and will also be livestreamed.

In person registration for this event is now closed. Please register to attend virtually. Stream this event via the APS YouTube. 

Can't make it? Join us instead at the Washington Crossing on Saturday, February 21 at 1:30 p.m. for a David Center Lecture! Details here.

Travis Glasson is a historian of Britain, the British Empire, and the transnational Atlantic world. He is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Temple University and an Affiliated Faculty member of Temple’s Global Studies Program.  He completed his MA and PhD at Columbia University and his BA at the College of the Holy Cross.

His book, Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2025) considers the wider history of neutrality through the experiences of the extended Cruger family, a New York-based merchant clan whose members included the radical Bristol MP Henry Cruger Jr. Although active in the pre-war colonial resistance movement, most of the Crugers were neither ardent “patriots” nor committed “loyalists” once the empire’s constitutional conflict turned into a shooting war, and their stories crystallize some of the dilemmas and decisions faced by those in the middle.

Glasson’s book, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2012) analyzes the efforts of eighteenth-century Church of England missionaries to convert enslaved and free black people to Christianity in colonial America, the Caribbean, and west Africa. That book also reveals how such missionary encounters contributed to wider debates about the nature of human difference, the morality of slavery, and the questions of abolition and emancipation. His other publications include book chapters and articles in journals including the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of British Studies.  

Glasson is currently the Temple History Department’s Director of Graduate Studies.  He has served as an officer and executive committee member of the North American Conference on British Studies.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has received grants and fellowships from institutions including the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, the Harvard University Atlantic Seminar, the American Historical Association, the Center for the Humanities at Temple, and Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge.