This panel continues the ongoing revisionist research into the experiences of eighteenth-century common soldiers. The last twenty years of scholarship from Christopher Duffy, Sascha and Katrin Möbius, and Ilya Berkovich, sometimes referred to as the “new school” argued that eighteenth-century enlisted men exercised considerable agency in their militaries during the twilight of the Old Regime. The present panel brings together scholars working on this theme in the French, Prussian, British, and American armies, with a particular focus on the literature and documents that soldiers produced themselves: above all, letters, but also petitions and pension applications. As we hear eighteenth-century soldiers in their own words and on their own terms, a picture emerges of men who were interested in maintaining long-distance ties with their families, possessed developed emotional lives, and used and participated in contemporary political and religious discourse in order to justify themselves and make claims regarding their lives. The historians in this panel have gathered previously unknown archival evidence from a variety of sources in order to understand eighteenth-century soldiers in their own words, overturning long held assumptions that eighteenth-century soldiers were illiterate and materially motivated drones who joined their militaries out of desperation.