About Us
Norman Desmarais
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Revolutionary Imprints was founded by Norman Desmarais to be a source for detailed information about the American War of Independence. Norman is a professor emeritus at Providence College and an active re-enactor. He is a member of Le Regiment Bourbonnais, the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment and the Brigade of the American Revolution. He is also a prolific author.
Norman is editor-in-chief of The Brigade Dispatch, the journal the Brigade of the American Revolution and the author of the 6-volume The Guide to the American Revolutionary War which covers almost 4000 actions on land and The Guide to the American Revolutionary War at Sea and Overseas which covers more than 10,500 actions. He has also translated the Gazette Françoise, the French newspaper published in Newport, RI by the French fleet that brought the Count de Rochambeau and 5800 French troops to America in July 1780. It is the first known service newspaper published by an expeditionary force.
In the course of his research, he collected just about every published diary of the Revolutionary War era and many other primary sources, including collections of letters and personal papers, many of which are difficult to obtain. These were digitized and Revolutionary Imprints has them available as searchable PDF documents. Check out the Primary Sources page to see the list of titles and annotated descriptions of their contents. Each document lists the sale price and is available for electronic transmission. Go to the Shop page and fill out the Online Order Form to indicate which documents you wish to purchase and the email address to send them.
We also provide many of these documents in thematic CD-ROMs, also in searchable PDF format. They can be ordered in the same way as the Primary Sources discussed in the previous paragraph.
Besides his books, available on the Shop page, Norman has written a number of articles. The most recent ones include:
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The French Newspaper in Newport Online Journal of Rhode Island History. December 3, 2021.
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Why Newport, Rhode Island, Scorned The French. Journal of the American Revolution. January 2, 2020.
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Mapping the British and French Occupation of Newport. The Brigade Dispatch. 43:1 (Spring 2013) pp. 9-13.
Norman is a member of the Board of Directors of the Boivin Center for the promotion of the French Language and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He was inducted into the American French Genealogical Society French-Canadian Hall of Fame in 2015 and received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.