Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy: Historian wins $50,000 prize for his book on the American Revolution

Enough about us. How did the Brits feel about the American Revolution?

That’s essentially the question historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy set out to answer, and now his book, “The Men Who Lost America” (Yale University Press), has won the George Washington Book Prize — snatching victory from the jaws of a very old defeat.

The $50,000 award, announced at a ceremony at Mount Vernon on Tuesday night, honors the previous year’s best book about early American history. The prize is sponsored by Washington College, theGilder Lehrman Institute of American History andGeorge Washington’s Mount Vernon.

In a statement praising the winner, Adam Goodheart, director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, said: “Countless popular books and Hollywood films have portrayed the redcoats and their leaders as blundering nincompoops at best, sneering sadists at worst. O’Shaughnessy’s work ought to kill these stereotypes once and for all — and, in the process, give Americans a richer and more nuanced understanding of our nation’s origins.”

O’Shaughnessy, a history professor at the University of Virginia, joked that winning the George Washington Prize at Mount Vernon for a book about the British side of the American Revolution sounds like “a man bites dog story.” But he noted that “there is in reality no better way to appreciate the achievement of the patriots than through the eyes of the British.”...