Circumstances in which people are feeling extreme disorientation are potent breeding grounds for people who are willing to exploit it to take advantage in moments of crisis.

Prince and the other enslaved men had no fondness for their fetters and felt acutely the contradiction between American ideals and their condition.

He held multiple allegiances during the Revolution, all of which were connected or stemmed from the importance he placed on familial self-preservation.

When facilitated responsibly, historical role-play can be an invaluable educational method because it encourages empathy and taking ownership of one’s participation in the classroom.

Arnold’s unceasing efforts to elevate himself in society through marriage and professional work can be viewed through the lens of the houses he bought or built throughout his life.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Once the door was opened to popular control of government, who knew how far the people would go?

Clothing studies are too often overlooked by historians and even material culture scholars. Kate Haulman makes an overdue and important […]

For the People can be profitably read as a sympathetic exposition of the various ways critics of American politics and society and adherents to popular sovereignty have been a mainstay of our political culture.

If there was one thing Revolutionary orators knew, it was that if you wanted to move people to action, you had to touch something deep within them.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Franklin had designed his currency to nurture Americans’ fortitude and resolve.

Congress sought to impose frugality and economic restraint as a means to unite a divergent people.

Combining Revolutionary politics with the social and cultural valences of gender, race, class, nation, and power, this political cartoon serves as a multidimensional cipher which people at every knowledge level can participate in analyzing.

Beneath and between its profoundly conservative and aristocratic institutions, Paine’s Britain was a rude, irreverent place where power was fragmented and liberty celebrated.

Historians have tended to assume that enslaved people inevitably, and eagerly, resisted slavery in a quest for liberty. Yet in fact, in the Berbice rebellion, many enslaved people were reluctant to join.

while students may giggle when the first clip begins, they really do listen to and enjoy the music.

It turns out that, in legal terms, the mystery of who found the broadside matters a lot less than who lost it.

Carp’s Boston Sons of Liberty are not the vanguard of the revolutionary era, as we have often seen them depicted, but rather a lot of wayward republicans.

“In 1767 the author of a letter to the editor of the New York Journal bemoaned the fashion that led women to double the size of their heads with the use of pomatum, artificial pads, and hair procured from corpses. But most distressing of all, the writer claimed, the ‘frizzled’ style resembled the ‘shock head of a Negro.'”

On a frigid Boston night in January 1774, a crowd of American colonials tarred and feathered a hated customs official.

“Few places in American history have been so much to so many: a house for parents and children; a workplace for slaves and servants; and, for the Indians who journeyed there from as far as Nova Scotia and South Carolina, an embassy, a store, and a clearinghouse for news.”

Down and dirty in eighteenth-century London and Boston

“He exclaimed ‘Lobsters! I’ll make Cornwallis and his men lobsters!”

Historical memory operates differently in professional military circles.

Bostonians of all political and economic factions came to identify themselves in opposition to the soldiers.

I want to begin to sketch out a definition of loyalism that is not inherently prejudicial…

When we read the war from the perspective of female Loyalists, Loyalism becomes even more inclusive.

A Historian’s Take on AMC’s Turn In telling the story of the American Revolution, academic historians and Hollywood filmmakers have […]

If we think of the War of Independence as a civil war fought between British subjects, we also get a sharper look at revolutionary politics during and after 1775-1776.

In recent years we have seen a surge of interest in American loyalists. Highlights of this renewed attention to loyalists […]

The case appears closed. But was Dr. Church really a spy for the British?

What falls within American Revolution scholarship? To what larger questions and themes should our more focused work speak?

It might have been old age that dimmed his memory and robbed him of a garrulousness that likely tired his grandchildren. It might have been the diffidence of a habitual loser unaccustomed to telling officialdom something good about himself. It might have been a posttraumatic reluctance to delve too deeply into old memories of terror and pain.

In September of 1776, the Continental Navy became the first American military branch to designate an official uniform. In March […]

In conjuring an audience for which the rules of fictional narrative are more immediately recognizable and count as surer argumentative proof than the empirical facts of the everyday, Martin neatly distills some of the stickiest problems of his past and our present.

The ribbon holds enormous potential for students of American military and political culture during the American Revolution, as well as of eighteenth-century American art history.

“Raphael’s claim that Massachusetts had completed the ‘first’ American Revolution in the latter of half of 1774 raises the perennial question as to what was the Revolution and how to periodize it.”

“Collective sovereignty is not what Americans sought. They wanted a rule of law that was consistent and fair.”

A man’s choice of a particular friend was assumed to be based on admiration for that friend’s sensibility and character; men found in these friendships a context for being understood and encouraging their best selves.

Resistant to quantification or even to classification, emotions are a slippery topic for any scholar at any time, and particularly so for historians.

American appeals for government action were framed in terms of requests by liberal, self-interested individuals, rather than the older, public logic of republicanism.

While O’Shaughnessy is always willing to criticize the men he profiles and to highlight the ways in which their personalities shaped their choices for better and worse, his treatments are consistently generous.

Americans love stories of the Revolutionary era, even if, as recent comments by leading politicians about Paul Revere, the geographic […]

In their law talk, Americans had to grapple with difficult questions such as the purpose of punishment, the right to judge, and the authority of lawgivers

I do not see the nation unfolding in a linear progression away from “Britishness” and towards cultural independence. Instead, what my research shows is that in the years following the Revolution […] Americans vacillated between emulation and repudiation of the mother country.

With my subject so elusive in the archive, material culture offered a compellingly direct link to her world

Obsessed with status, revolutionary gentlemen aimed to strengthen their newly acquired political authority by promoting social, cultural, and economic practices and associations that emphasized hierarchy and obedience in the 1780s.

If there ever was a time when American media was unbiased, it was certainly not during the Revolutionary War.

Many of the essays in Dillon’s and Drexler’s book focus on incidents of “obscured interdependence,” moments when the United States’s very attempts to distance itself from Haiti reveal the presence of a deep and abiding, if disavowed, relationship between the revolutionary neighbors.

We talkwith Julia Gaffield about Haiti’s foreign relations in its early years of independence, the place of the Haitian Revolution, and the impact of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

New things are happening with the Stamp Act, and this volume should signal to a broad range of scholars that 1765 is a good year for deep thinking.

Nearly since the ink was drying on the Declaration of Independence, nationalistic Americans have opined that American nationhood was inevitable, […]

Vowell has a sharp eye for paradox, contradiction, coincidence, and most especially for hypocrisy. She delights in poking her finger into the eye of American complacency.

The birth of a nation is not only or always a national story.

Assassin’s Creed 3 presents players with a large number of both historic and fictional non-player characters, but unfortunately the majority of these come across as little more than plot elements.

War in Europe set the stage for political crisis, revolution, civil war, and the fragmentation of Spanish America.

Cornwell captures the multivalent nature of the Revolutionary War.

The problem with the book is the exact opposite of a dubious or controversial thesis.

To understand African American experience under slavery, it is imperative to consider region, and not just in northern versus southern terms.

Adam Smith never attached the invisible hand of the market to a fully formed body, but he and his fellow […]

In seeing identity construction as a negotiated performance, Alex Myers’s novel reflects the historical literature, as does his representation of eighteenth-century friendship, masculinity, soldiering, and material culture.

Ask the Author invites a group of distinguished scholars of Revolutionary America to participate in a forum on the continuing importance of The Stamp Act Crisis.

Nelson’s driving argument is that the “fear of legislative tyranny” that animated royalists in the 1640s and 1650s also shaped the constitutional thought of an influential group he labels “patriot royalists.”

Living as I do in Williamsburg, Virginia, I am surrounded by the American Revolution. Here are the buildings where the […]

Historical editors can never fully anticipate the needs of future historians, but hopefully with a growing respect for the full documentary record, including material that might, to some, be considered unimportant, editors will begin to add accounts, images, and other addenda and make them searchable, as the editors of the George Washington papers have done.

There’s an old military proverb: No army ever rode into battle shouting fine distinctions. In Philip Gould’s Writing the Rebellion, […]

Government by Dissent is an engaging meditation on one of America’s founding fantasies—the fantasy of democratic self-government. In 1776 Thomas […]

The continental versus Atlantic debate is more about historiography than history.

Was age in early America an objective measure of years, an individual’s self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official?

So, over this past weekend I was sweating over a long-overdue article [hi, Sean!] on Philip Freneau, the so-called “poet […]

The satire’s narrator is a louse who has lived on a series of heads in and around Paris and been witness to the political maneuverings happening behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

Artists seemed to float above (or outside) the fray, but they certainly made hay in the shadow of the Revolution fixing the public memory of the event and its cast of characters.

While many aspects of early American life were bound by geography, many others transcended it.

Accuracy versus “Truth” in Television As a young kid I spent a portion of every summer with my father riding […]

The American Revolution was disruptive and challenging for plantation societies. Its most significant long-term effect was an artificial separation of […]

The edge between a forest and a field, with its mixture of habitats, can also host a rich diversity of species. Some are drawn to and thrive on the edge—generalists such as raccoons and coyotes—while other species cannot survive in or even enter the edge.

A Historical Turn for the Better, or Worse? Scholars of early America have a complicated relationship with historical movies and […]

How Durben in Glasgow Became Dearborn in Quebec I discovered a Revolutionary-era journal written by a Captain Durben—from an unexpected […]

The difficulty of making a good American Revolution movie has something to do with the challenge of finding a plot for the Revolution that can be arranged in the form of a family drama.

To ask whether a revolution is a civil war narrows the topic considerably, forcing us to focus on the war itself, the violent and more troubling part of the story.

My sister has a box of extraordinary things such as are not to be seen every day.

If Paine’s brand of radicalism helped mark the ideological dividing line between Republicans and Federalists in the 1790s and 1800s, his words have more recently been appropriated by politicians from across the political spectrum.

Americans fought righteously, and with their eyes on the main chance. They fought for themselves, for their comrades in arms, for their families, for their communities, and with God on their side.

The American Revolution helped to form the idea of conscious, willed, systemic, historic change—and thereby the very notion of agency itself.

I treasure many of the conversations I had with my fellow citizens at their doorsteps, and I think if I had been blessed with musical talent, I could have waxed as lyrical about suburbanites as another Woody did about hoboes and Okies.

Why was it, then, that such reverential colonists came to desecrate the king?

What was the meaning of the Revolution for African Americans and whites in Rhode Island in terms of their understanding of race and citizenship?

Enslaved Virginians’ persistent attempts to acquire their personal liberty shaped nearly every discussion of taxes and military service.

The smuggling business represented the effort of small producers (who claimed simply to be free traders) in an economically marginal environment to take advantage of external market demand, and it contributed to the growth of the local middle class that took part in it.

Why do people perpetuate, by continuing to live within, societies in which violence, both threatened and actual, is a constant of life?

In the near future, it may be possible to write an early American history that considers the role of gut microbiota, which, as scientists are documenting, play a critical role in everything from obesity to disease progression.

Here’s why I was holding back my experiences at the NYC tea party from earlier this week: The night turned […]

The past is often portrayed in ways that celebrate the victors, and we are all familiar with versions of history that function as propaganda for those who hold power.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Urban Crucible and some of Nash’s articles from the 1970s provided a model of how crucial and previously unknown details of the lives of ordinary people could be extracted from dry-as-dust tax lists, account books, and the like, and used to tell a new story of how the colonial city worked.”

By the late eighteenth century, Americans were well on their way to understanding democracy as a process, really the process, for pursuing politics.

Social Media Highlights Click here for an eventifier page that has compiled all 700+ tweets and 20+ photos from the […]

In place of powdered wigs and radical ideals, Berkin shows us bloody legs and dirty shirts.

Among artists and craftsman, Lovell notes how kinship and patronage were often closely aligned.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Modern Franklin Gets the Boot [UPDATED] Outbreaks of popular resistance against expert medical advice are a long Anglo-American tradition, and […]

I also think professional historians should be more open to what self-trained, so-called amateur historians can teach them.

Both New Englanders and English dissenters talked the talk of Protestant internationalism and unity, but when the conflict between Britain and the American colonies escalated, they did not walk the walk.

The collapse of “psychohistory” and “psychobiography” appears to have been nearly total.

Translating John and Abigail’s correspondence into contemporary social media posts prompted students to look outward and consider the continuities and discontinuities between past and present social media.

Simple, yet significant teaching moves can result in students who can make informed decisions, who can develop reasoned arguments, and who can engage in problem solving.

Electricity was one of the leading branches of experimental science in the Enlightenment, certainly the branch with the highest public profile owing to the proliferation of commercial entertainments after the 1740s, both in Europe and British America, where customers willingly paid for the novel experience of having the “electric fire” course through their bodies.

During the early twentieth century, Charles McLean Andrews (1863-1943), the most influential early American historian of his time, spent several […]

Time and again between the earliest period of colonization and the Civil War, North American people waged ferocious war over […]

Common-place asks David Waldstreicher whether Franklin deserves his reputation as the nation’s antislavery founder.

The taste of independence Sampson experienced as a “masterless woman,” according to Young, may have contributed to her willingness to seek her fortunes as Robert Shurtliff in May 1782.

If John Adams recognized Winthrop as a Founding Father, and was joined in that judgment by a growing number of Americans in the nineteenth century, how and when did we manage to forget Winthrop?

“Stanford historian Jack Rakove, who serves as consultant, confesses, ‘If you ask from a historian’s vantage point, how does this correspond to contemporary scholarship? Well, probably, not that well. But if you ask, what is it that students of this age ought to be introduced to so that they have a rough idea of the Revolution, it’s actually pretty good.”

From May 30 to June 1, 2013, the David Library of the American Revolution, the McNeil Center for Early American […]

“In the period of initial contacts with Europeans, Native Americans lacked any exposure at all to Variola; when it arrived in a given locality, virtually the entire population was likely to be infected . . . “

“[T]hese days it seems Americans prefer their Founding Fathers warts and all: fresher, snappier, even naughty.”

“Sobel’s book is notable in turning our attention back to a topic too long thought off limits to historians: the psychological origins of race and racism.”

McGrath’s skill in shaping characters and crafting prose is not to be denied. Whether he has transcended previous fictional attempts to make some sense of the American Revolution is another matter.

Heroic in its synthesizing, perhaps, but not in its style, this book conceives of people lifelessly and in the aggregate.

Editors’ note: as many readers may be aware, Professor Bellesiles’s research methods and scholarly standards have become the subject of considerable debate since Common-place first published this essay in September 2000, the same month that Arming America appeared in print. In October 2002, Bellesiles resigned his faculty position at Emory University. Both the report of the independent investigative committee whose findings led to his resignation, and Bellesiles’s response are available online.

Death of a Notary offers a particularly good example of the possibilities of microhistory, although Merwick never refers to her study in those terms. Merwick’s careful reconstruction of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam’s life illustrates the rewards of microhistory’s emphasis on rigorous interpretation of small details and small subjects.

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