T. Cole Jones

The American Revolution, Colonial British North America, Comparative Revolutions, the Cultural History of Violence and Warfare

Cole Jones is the author of Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution (Penn Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Society of the Cincinnati Prize from the American Revolution Institute and the 2022 Excellence in American History Book Award from the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. The book also received honorable mentions for the Colonel Richard W. Ulbrich Memorial Book Award from the U.S. Military History Group and the Harry M. Ward Book Prize from the American Revolution Roundtable of Richmond, and it was a finalist for the Journal of the American Revolution 2020 Book of the Year Award.

Captives of Liberty was reviewed in New York Times, Choice Reviews, American Historical Review, Reviews in American History, Journal of American History, Journal of the Early Republic, William and Mary Quarterly, Social History, Journal of Military History, Journal of the American Revolution, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Early American History, Journal of British Studies, History: Reviews of New Books, Pennsylvania History, and Strategypage.com

Jones received his Ph.D. in early American history from the Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in history from Duke University. Prior to coming to Purdue, he was the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the New-York Historical Society.

Jones has published numerous articles in academic journals and edited collections, including New England Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of Military History, and Common-Place. He has received fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Army Center of Military History, and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, among others.

Jones is at work on his next book, which is provisionally entitled, Tory Rising: Insurrection in the Revolutionary South. He has received fellowships to support this research from the Virginia Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the Georgian Papers Programme from King's College London and George Washington's Mount Vernon.

Jones welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in the era of the American Revolution.

List of Publications







"Citizen for Citizen: The Problem of Political Prisoners in the American Revolution,” in Lorien Foote and Daniel Krebs, eds., Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2021).

"Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution" University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16007.html 

“’Elated with victory, and reeking with revenge’: The Yorktown Prisoners and the Laws of War in Revolutionary America,” in Glenn Moots and Philip Hamilton eds., Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War of Independence (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).