The Year Of The Hangman Sparknotes

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Throughout his novel, Gary Blackwood poses the question: What if we lost the American Revolution? In the novel, The Year of the Hangman, our main character, Creighton Brown, lives a spoiled life in England, after his father, Harry Brown, had died in the American uprising. Then, after another night of gambling he was kidnapped and shipped off to the Americas to live with his uncle, by order of his mother. As he was traveling to Louisiana with his uncle, his ship gets raided by American pirates, who take his uncle hostage and send him to work for the infamous Dr. Franklin, after he lied to him about his connection to his uncle. Creighton then faces his conscience as the line between right and wrong, good and evil, American or England, gets thinner …show more content…

For instance, in the beginning of the novel, Creighton and his uncle are heading for Florida, as his uncle has just been transferred by the British army. On their journey, they come across what they thought to be a merchant ship, “’ Can you make out her colors?’ thee colonel asked. ‘She’s flying the Union Jack,’ the captain said.”(Blackwood 45), “‘It’s a ruse, gentlemen! Prepare to-’His command was cut off by an enormous roar, like a pearl of thunder, but ten times louder. In the same instance there came a sickening splintering sound, and suddenly the air was filled with flying bits of wood and metal.” (Blackwood 47). The privateer that attacked them was part of the American Navy. If our author, Gary Blackwood, did not choose to change history in the way that he did, there would have been no suspense to this encounter, or many other further on in the …show more content…

Marks, where he had hoped to find the great General Washington. He instead found not the genera, but a former friend of his he long thought dead, “‘What’s your name? Can you tell me your name?’ The reply was so feeble that Creighton could scarcely hear, but he could have sworn that the man said, ‘Brown. Harry Brown.’” (Blackwood 233) At this point of the novel Creighton is overwhelmed by the prospect that his father was not in fact dead, but very much living. He had come to know that what he had taken as a heavy loss, a heart breaking, life changing moment, had all been erased in an

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