In a sense, within an imperial context, humanitarian assistance inadvertently provided some Acadian women refugees with a platform unlike they had ever had before. 

Marine insurance itself was a business that flourished during periods of war and uncertainty. It had a complex relationship with the British state.

“Did Moncacht-apé really make this transcontinental journey nearly a century before Lewis and Clark?

The landscape was often unforgiving, making exploration difficult, and when the Spanish attempted to get help from the many Native groups in the region they were often met with silence or hostility.

Because of their insistence on pacifism, Quakers historically have been treated as suspicious, at best, or traitors, at worst.

The anti-Indian sublime was as much about lambasting particular non-Indians as dividing whites from Indians.

Ephrata monks experienced an intentional and dramatic physical transformation.

The hostilities that triggered the American portion of the Seven Years’ War began in the Ohio Valley, and the war was fought in part for imperial possession of the region. But was the war really about the Ohio Valley itself?

the Seven Years’ War was actually a war for several different empires–each shaped as much by provincial conditions as by metropolitan goals–with the one that culminated in the independence of the United States being only the most conspicuous.

Crucible of War has nearly as much to teach about form and style as it does about the Seven Years’ War.

of course, Crucible of War is both imperfect in form, and incomplete–with respect to the scholarship it seeks to synthesize, no less than to the immensity of the event it tries to capture.

Crucible of War begins with hints toward the possibility of a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent (to steal a phrase from Kant), but ends firmly within the paradigm of American history.

This issue Common-place holds a round table discussion of Fred Anderson’s new history of the Seven Years’ War, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. This forum expands on an earlier round table discussion of Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War featuring the authors and moderator Pauline Maier, hosted by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

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