Results by title

231 books match the query 'Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)' and 11 start with s

Sort by

Scotland and America in the Age of Paine

Ronald Lyndsey Crawford

Aberdeen University Press, 2022

Thomas Paine is rightly regarded as among the most influential of English political iconoclasts. His two best-known works – Common Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (1791) – ensured his remarkable success in positioning himself, both literally and literarily, at the forefront of both the American and French revolutions. It is no exaggeration that Paine’s works lie at the heart of popular revolutionary sentiment as it came to express itself in the later eighteenth century. For that reason they were regarded at one level as manifestos of the crying need for social and political change, but at the same time by government and the law as dangerous instruments of sedition and republicanism. In this title from Aberdeen University Press, Ronald Crawford explores how, in both Scotland and America, Paine’s brand of radicalism took particular hold, though only for a limited period – the ‘Age of Paine’. Part One of the book explores American themes discoverable in the works of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson; the explosive political impact within Scotland of Rights of Man (1776); and how Scottish precedents, through the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, helped shape the educational system of the early United States. Part Two examines the careers of four Scots emigrants who made distinguished contributions to the American ideal of liberty: the ‘bookman’ Robert Aitken who employed Paine as contributing editor of his Pennsylvania Magazine; John Witherspoon, President of the College of New Jersey, one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence in 1776; the radical poet, Alexander Wilson, whose (very different) Scottish and American careers are re-examined with the help of newly found original sources; and the lawyer from Fife, James Wilson, another signer, whose remarkable contributions to the evolution of the US Constitution are considered from the point of view of his indebtedness to numerous Scottish sources.

[more]

Seized with the Temper of the Times

Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America

Abby Chandler

Westholme Publishing, 2023

“Our personal rights, comprehending those of life, liberty, and estate is every subject’s birthright, whether born in Great Britain or in the colonies” wrote Rhode Island lawyer and politician Martin Howard in a pamphlet defending the Stamp Act. Howard’s opponents drew on a similar fusion of Anglo-American common law and political tradition to voice their own arguments against Parliamentary taxation. Still, such commonalities were not enough to save Howard during Newport’s Stamp Act riots when a mob destroyed his home and forced him to flee to London. Martin was later appointed North Carolina’s Chief Justice, where he played an important role in another crisis, the Regulator Rebellion. The complexities and seeming contradictions that informed the writings of Martin Howard and his colonial counterparts during both the Stamp Act crisis and the Regulator Rebellion bring these understudied movements to vivid life, while also telling a broader story about the evolution of American political thought in the decades surrounding the American Revolution.
In Seized with the Temper of the Times Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America, historian Abby Chandler explores, as never before, the complex local and transatlantic tensions which infused the early imperial crisis. She argues that colonial responses to the Stamp Act were rooted in local tensions and that the Regulator Rebellion was fueled by trans-Atlantic tensions. These two paradoxes, a local crisis cast as imperial affair and an imperial affair cast as local crisis, tell a very different story than the one to which we are accustomed. Without pre-existing local tensions, the fury of the Stamp Act crisis might not have spilled over during the summer of 1765, and, without the added strains of the imperial crisis, the Regulator Rebellion might not have lasted for five years. The questions about the intersecting roles of local and imperial/federal interests and identities raised during both the Stamp Act crisis and the Regulator Rebellion would also continue to inform political thought in Rhode Island and North Carolina in the coming decades. Both colonies had long histories of challenges to their autonomy and their residents embraced the coming revolution before many of their counterparts, but they would also be reluctant participants in the rising union envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.

[more]

Settling Ohio

First Peoples and Beyond

Timothy G. Anderson and Brian Schoen

Ohio University Press, 2023

Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also for forming the United States and the future of world history. Settling Ohio begins with an overview of the first people who inhabited the region, who built civilizations that moved massive amounts of earth and left an archaeological record that drew the interest of subsequent settlers and continues to intrigue scholars. It highlights how, in the eighteenth century, Native Americans who migrated from the East and North interacted with Europeans to develop impressive trading networks and how they navigated complicated wars and sought to preserve national identities in the face of violent attempts to remove them from their lands. The book situates the traditional story of Ohio settlement, including the Northwest Ordinance, the dealings of the Ohio Company of Associates, and early road building, into a far richer story of contested spaces, competing visions of nationhood, and complicated relations with Indian peoples. By so doing, the contributors provide valuable new insights into how chaotic and contingent early national politics and frontier development truly were. Chapters highlighting the role of apple-growing culture, education, African American settlers, and the diverse migration flows into Ohio from the East and Europe further demonstrate the complex multiethnic composition of Ohio’s early settlements and the tensions that resulted. A final theme of this volume is the desirability of working to recover the often-forgotten history of non-White peoples displaced by the processes of settler colonialism that has been, until recently, undervalued in the scholarship.

[more]

Sex and the Founding Fathers

The American Quest for a Relatable Past

Thomas A. Foster

Temple University Press, 2016

Biographers, journalists, and satirists have long used the subject of sex to define the masculine character and political authority of America's Founding Fathers. Tracing these commentaries on the Revolutionary Era's major political figures in Sex and the Founding Fathers, Thomas Foster shows how continual attempts to reveal the true character of these men instead exposes much more about Americans and American culture than about the Founders themselves.

Sex and the Founding Fathers examines the remarkable and varied assessments of the intimate lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris from their own time to ours. Interpretations can change radically; consider how Jefferson has been variously idealized as a chaste widower, condemned as a child molester, and recently celebrated as a multicultural hero.

Foster considers the public and private images of these generally romanticized leaders to show how each generation uses them to reshape and reinforce American civic and national identity.

[more]

Situation Critical

Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies

Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly, editors

Duke University Press, 2024

The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together essays by a diverse group of historians and literary scholars, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. The contributors examine topics ranging from the indeterminacy of knowledge and history to Black speculative writing and nineteenth-century epistemology, the role of the unconscious in settler colonialism, and early American writing about masturbation, repression, religion, and secularism and their respective influence on morality. The contributors also offer vital new interpretations of major lines of thought in the history of critique—especially those relating to Freud and Foucault—that will be valuable both for scholars of early American studies and for scholars of the humanities and interpretive social sciences more broadly.

Contributors. Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly, Matthew Crow, John J. Garcia, Christopher Looby, Michael Meranze, Mark J. Miller, Justine S. Murison, Britt Rusert, Ana Schwartz, Joan W. Scott, Jordan Alexander Stein

[more]

Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

David Curtis Skaggs

Michigan State University Press, 2001

The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes contains twenty essays concerning not only military and naval operations, but also the political, economic, social, and cultural interactions of individuals and groups during the struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and rivers between the Ohio Valley and the Canadian Shield. Contributing scholars represent a wide variety of disciplines and institutional affiliations from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
Collectively, these important essays delineate the common thread, weaving together the series of wars for the North American heartland that stretched from 1754 to 1814. The war for the Great Lakes was not merely a sideshow in a broader, worldwide struggle for empire, independence, self-determination, and territory. Rather, it was a single war, a regional conflict waged to establish hegemony within the area, forcing interactions that divided the Great Lakes nationally and ethnically for the two centuries that followed.

[more]

South Carolina Provincials

Loyalists in British Service During the American Revolution

Jim Piecuch

Westholme Publishing, 2026

The Loyalists who supported the British during the American Revolution have frequently been neglected in accounts of that conflict. Nevertheless, Loyalists made significant efforts to assist British forces in restoring royal control of the thirteen colonies. This was especially true in South Carolina, where backcountry Loyalists under almost-forgotten leaders such as Joseph Robinson and Euan McLaurin challenged the Revolutionary movement in 1775. Although their initial efforts were unsuccessful, Robinson, McLaurin, and hundreds of their followers eventually made their way to British East Florida, where they organized into a provincial regiment called the South Carolina Royalists. Operating in concert with British efforts, the Royalists were part of many notable actions from 1778 to 1781, including the defenses of East Florida and Savannah, Georgia, and the battles of Briar Creek, Stono Ferry, Musgrove’s Mill, and Hobkirk’s Hill. A second provincial regiment created in 1780, Major John Harrison’s South Carolina Rangers, saw considerably action in operations against partisans under Francis Marion. When the British were forced to evacuate their backcountry posts in 1781, the Royalists, Rangers, and three troops of Provincial Light Dragoons raised earlier in the year withdrew first to Charleston and then East Florida. From there, many went to Canada at the war’s end, with others dispersing to different British colonies to begin new lives after their strenuous but unsuccessful effort on behalf of king and country.
In South Carolina Provincials: Loyalists in British Service During the American Revolution, historian Jim Piecuch provide the first comprehensive history of those South Carolinians who took up arms to assist the British during their attempt to quell the rebellion in the South. Based on primary source research including records rarely consulted, the result provides a much clearer picture of the American Revolution at the local level in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.

[more]

Spark of Independence

The American Revolution in the Northern Colonies, 1775–1776

Michael Cecere

Westholme Publishing, 2024

The Independence Trilogy
The Independence Trilogy (Spark of Independence, United for Independence, March to Independence) seeks to answer one simple question. What happened in the thirteen colonies after bloodshed erupted at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 until independence was declared in July 1776?
For the Northern colonies, the traditional view is that they reacted as one in their opposition to Great Britain, each sending troops to Massachusetts to help form an Army of Observation that within two months of Lexington became the Continental Army. This is indeed what happened, and the events at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and the siege of Boston had a tremendous impact on each New England colony.But so too did other events that occurred in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Clashes with the British navy in far-away Machias, on the coast of present-day Maine, as well as in Boston Harbor, Massachusetts Bay, Buzzards Bay, Narragansett Bay, and the Long Island Sound; the destruction of Falmouth (present-day Portland, Maine), the bombardment of Stonington, Connecticut, and the threatened destruction of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newport, Rhode Island, all contributed to the growing sentiment for independence that grew in New England following the outbreak of war. New Englanders, too, participated in the American effort to seize Canada in 1775 with troops under Colonel Benedict Arnold who marched through the wilderness of Maine to Quebec. New Englanders also joined General Philip Schuyler and participated in the capture of St. Jeans and Montreal. New England soldiers captured Fort Ticonderoga in New York just a few weeks after Lexington, and of course most notably, the Continental Army that besieged Boston in 1775 was comprised almost entirely of New England volunteers.
Like its companion volumes, Spark of Independence: The American Revolution in the Northern Colonies, 1775–1776 by historian Michael Cecere extensively uses primary source documents to explore both the well known and less-known clashes and events that occurred during the fifteen months between Lexington and Concord and the Declaration of Independence, and how these events contributed to the growing support across the colonies for independence from Great Britain by 1776.

[more]

Spies in the Continental Capital

Espionage Across Pennsylvania During the American Revolution

John A. Nagy

Westholme Publishing, 2011

The Critical Role of British, French, and American Intelligence Operations in Colonial Pennsylvania
It did not take long after the Seven Years’ War—the French and Indian War in North America—for France to return spies to America in order to determine the likelihood of regaining the territory they lost to Britain. One of the key places of French espionage was the colony of Pennsylvania since its frontier had been an important crossroads of French influence in North America. The French recognized then that there was a real possibility that the colonies would seek their independence from Britain. Against this backdrop, award-winning historian John A. Nagy begins his investigation of espionage in colonial Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia played a key role in the history of spying during the American Revolution because it was the main location for the Continental Congress, was occupied by the British Command, and then returned to Continental control. Philadelphia became a center of spies for the British and Americans—as well as double agents. George Washington was a firm believer in reliable military intelligence; after evacuating New York City, he neglected to have a spy network in place: when the British took over Philadelphia, he did not make the same mistake, and Washington was able to keep abreast of British troop strengths and intentions. Likewise, the British used the large Loyalist community around Philadelphia to assess the abilities of their Continental foes, as well as the resolve of Congress. In addition to describing techniques used by spies and specific events, such as the Major André episode, Nagy has scoured rare primary source documents to provide new and compelling information about some of the most notable agents of the war, such as Lydia Darragh, a celebrated American spy.

An important contribution to Revolutionary War history, Spies in the Continental Capital: Espionage Across Pennsylvania During the American Revolution demonstrates that intelligence operations on both sides emanating from Pennsylvania were vast, well-designed, and critical to understanding the course and outcome of the war.

[more]

Stephen Decatur

American Naval Hero, 1779-1820

Robert J. Allison

University of Massachusetts Press, 2005

Born to a prominent Philadelphia family in 1779, Stephen Decatur at age twenty-five became the youngest man ever to serve as a captain in the U.S. Navy. His intrepid heroism, leadership, and devotion to duty made him a perfect symbol of the aspirations of the growing nation. Leading men to victory in Tripoli, the War of 1812, and the Algerian war of 1815, and coining the phrase “Our country, right or wrong,” Decatur created an enduring legend of bravery, celebrated in poetry, song, paintings, and the naming of dozens of towns—from Georgia to Alabama to Illinois.

After the War of 1812, Decatur moved to Washington to help direct naval policy. His close friendships with James Madison, John Quincy Adams, and other political leaders soon made him a rising star in national politics. He and his wife Susan made their elegant home on Lafayette Square near the White House a center of Washington society. The capital and the entire nation were shocked in 1820 when Decatur died at the age of forty-one in a duel with a rival navy captain.

In this carefully researched and well-written biography, historian Robert Allison tells the story of Decatur's eventful life at a time when the young republic was developing its own identity—when the American people were deciding what kind of nation they would become. Although he died prematurely, Decatur played a significant role in the shaping of that national identity.

[more]