Putnam

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Put·nam

(pŭt′nəm), Israel 1718-1790.

American soldier active in the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War. During the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775), he supposedly issued the order, "Don't one of you shoot until you see the whites of their eyes."

Putnam

, Rufus 1738-1824.

American Revolutionary soldier who organized (1775) the batteries on Dorchester Heights that eventually forced the British to evacuate Boston.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Putnam

(ˈpʌtnəm)

1. (Biography) Israel. 1718–90, American general in the War of Independence

2. (Biography) his cousin Rufus. 1738–1824, American soldier in the War of Independence; surveyor general of the US (1796–1803)

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

Put•nam

(ˈpʌt nəm)

n.

1. Israel, 1718–90, American Revolutionary general.

2. Rufus, 1738–1824, American Revolutionary officer: engineer and colonizer in Ohio.

Mentioned in ?

Putnam Rufus

References in classic literature ?

Putnam's Sons, three volumes, $3.50 a volume) should be mentioned.

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Then the grey sky-line brightened into silver, and in the broadening light he realized that he had been to the house which belonged to an Anglo-Indian Major named Putnam; and that the Major had a native cook from Malta who was of his communion.

Major Putnam was a bald-headed, bull-necked man, short and very broad, with one of those rather apoplectic faces that are produced by a prolonged attempt to combine the oriental climate with the occidental luxuries.

"Did he--" asked Major Putnam in a lowered voice, "did he fall or cry out, or anything?"

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When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.

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One of these worthies--a tall, lank figure, brandishing a rusty sword of immense longitude--purported to be no less a personage than General George Washington; and the other principal officers of the American army, such as Gates, Lee, Putnam, Schuyler, Ward and Heath, were represented by similar scarecrows.

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{Highlands = the Hudson Highlands, a mountainous region in Putnam and Dutchess Counties, through which the Hudson River passes in a deep and picturesque gorge; Eolus = God of the winds; Boreas = God of the North wind; Seneca = one of the Finger Lakes in central New York State; Grecian king = both the Senecas of antiquity, the rhetorician (54 BC-39 AD) and his son the philosopher/statesman (4 BC-65 AD), were, of course, Romans--in any case, Lake Seneca is named after the Seneca nation of the Iroquois Indians; Park-Place = already in 1816 a fashionable street in lower Manhattan; Chippewa = an American army defeated the British at Chippewa, in Canada near Niagara Falls, on July 5, 1814; Lawrence = Captain James ("Don't give up the ship!") Lawrence (1781-

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An article in Putnam's Monthly entitled 'I and My Chimney,' another called 'October Mountain,' and the introduction to the 'Piazza Tales,' present faithful pictures of Arrow Head and its surroundings.

'Pierre; or, the Ambiguities' (1852) was published, and there ensued a long series of hostile criticisms, ending with a severe, though impartial, article by Fitz-James O'Brien in Putnam's Monthly.

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Of one thing I am distinctly conscious: the man's presence at my side was strangely distasteful and disquieting--so much so that when I at last pulled up under the lights of the Putnam House I experienced a sense of having escaped some spiritual peril of a nature peculiarly forbidding.

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I stand prepared to bring thirty reliable witnesses to prove that Putnam's famous feat at Horseneck was insignificant compared to this.

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There was General Putnam, too, who was known all over New England by the name of Old Put."