Index to Maps of the American Revolution in Books and Periodicals: Illustrating the Revolutionary War and Other Events of the Period, 1763-1789

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-222
Author(s):  
Paula D. Hunt

Sybil Ludington, “the female Paul Revere,” has proven to be a remarkably protean figure in the memory of and contestation over the American Revolution. Her place in history has shifted in response to changing currents in culture and politics, demonstrating the ways in which the past is made and remade to satisfy contemporary audiences.


1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWARD TANG

With how little cooperation of the societies after all is the past remembered – At first history had no muse – but a kind fate watched over her – some garrulous old man with tenacious memory told it to his child.Henry David Thoreau,Journals (1842)In 1823, something of the bittersweet occurred in Cranston, Rhode Island: an aged revolutionary war veteran returned to his hometown after a prolonged exile in England. Hopeful about reuniting with his family and community after an absence of nearly fifty years, the old soldier was surprised and disappointed to learn that his property had been sold, his family had moved west, and few among the remaining villagers even remembered who he was. Such is the story of one Israel Potter. An adventurous fellow, he had fought at the battle near Bunker Hill, had met Benjamin Franklin, and, after being captured by the British, had roamed England after the war, continually poverty-stricken, while searching for a passage back to America. Once returned to Cranston, he applied for a federal pension for his wartime services. In all probability, Potter never received any financial compensation, but he left a narrative of his life, reminding his readers that at one point in the republic's history, he did matter.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Rachel B. Herrmann

This introductory chapter discusses the important role of hunger during the American Revolution. Enduring, ignoring, creating, and preventing hunger were all ways to exercise power during the American Revolution. Hunger prompted violence and forged ties; it was a weapon of war and a tool of diplomacy. In North America, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Miami, and Shawnee Indians grew and destroyed foodstuffs during the Revolutionary War, which forced their British and American allies to hunger with them, and to furnish provisions that accommodated Native tastes. By the 1810s, the United States had learned how to prevent Indian hunger, to weaponize food aid, and to deny Indians the power gained by enduring and ignoring scarcity. Meanwhile, people of African descent gained some power by creating white hunger during the Revolutionary War, but more so as formerly enslaved communities, primarily after leaving the new United States and migrating to British colonies in Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone. After white officials in Sierra Leone realized that colonists' hunger-prevention efforts gave them too much freedom, black colonists lost their hunger-preventing rights. Ultimately, three key behaviors changed and were, in turn, changed by evolving ideas about hunger: food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism.


Author(s):  
James P. Byrd

Americans rarely saw flags until 1861. Few people put up flags outside their homes, and churches did not normally fly them either. With the onset of the war, however, flags appeared everywhere—in churches, homes, businesses, and elsewhere. The flag northerners flew honored the nation of the beloved founders—a flag descended from the flag of the American Revolution—and as northerners honored the flag, they compared their war with the Revolutionary War. Not to be outdone, southerners insisted that they, not the northern aggressors, were carrying on the Revolutionary legacy. Which side was more faithful to the American Revolution? Americans debated this question throughout the war, and never more fervently than at the war’s beginning. As each side claimed to be most faithful to the patriots of 1776, they employed the Bible to support their arguments and to recruit soldiers for the fight.


1978 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Jared A. Brown

In October, 1774, the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, passed a resolution designed to ‘discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation’, including the ‘exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments’. The Revolution would begin within six months, and Congress was clearly attempting to prepare Americans for a period of austerity. But if Congress intended to eliminate all theatrical activities for the duration of the hostilities, it could not have failed more completely. Indeed, the American Revolution saw more theatrical activity on American soil than had ever taken place there before. British military officers – who brought with them a strong theatre-going tradition – sponsored lavish performances of plays in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere between 1775 and 1783. In turn, the remarkable number of British theatrical productions stimulated certain American military officials to countenance performances given by American officers for audiences of soldiers and civilians. This may have been illegal, but it boosted morale and it was intended to demonstrate that Americans could compete with the British on any level, including the theatrical.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sehoon Baek ◽  
Jeffry Bedore

The paper is a comparison between the English court case Somerset v. Stewart(1772) and the infamous American suit Scott v. Sandford(1857), both of which deal with the issue of a slave’s freedom and seeks to analyze the reason why the judges overseeing these cases rendered different verdicts. The paper specifically explains the verdict of Somerset, which freed the slave in question, and Scott, which did not, in a socio-economic lens, pointing to the American dependency on slavery as a factor in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans, which was less of a factor in England that contributed to an early end to slavery in that country, including through the inclusion of black men in the Royal Army and Navy during Britain’s conflicts with the United States of America. Although a misinterpretation of Somerset’s Judge Lord Mansfield’s verdict, a wide-spread, broad understanding of his decision led to the acceptance of legal freedom for slaves throughout Britain, reinforcing American attempts to resist runaway attempts of slaves for British-controlled territory during the Revolutionary War and later the War of 1812. The paper finally renders the American Revolution as a hypocritical one that did not immediately contribute to equality, and notes Mansfield’s overlooked role in the abolition of chattel slavery.


2004 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 595-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Matson

In the half-century following the American Revolution, journalists and promoters of economic activities wrote paeans to the independence movement, celebrating its release of economic energies and anticipating that it would enable citizens to improve, produce, and consume more and thus sustain their virtuous republican character as a people. Writers predicted that imminent prosperity would result in the construction of mills, forges, and retail networks throughout the hinterlands; they envisioned boldly experimental internal improvements and expanding commerce under the independent auspices of the newly formed states and locales. Liberated Americans could look forward to blending certain kinds of regulatory protections and government encouragements, such as they had experienced under the rule of the empire, and to the aggressive pursuit of economic opportunities: creating new kinds of taxation and currency systems, expanding commerce to foreign ports, extending agriculture to the limits of available technologies and capital, and testing modest manufactures. For two generations following the Revolution, until at least the panic of 1819, many optimists were confirmed in their expectations of a bright future for the new nation's economy, and they embraced the risks involved in mobilizing tremendous amounts of human energy and capital because they believed that economic development would resolve foreign nations' doubts about the new republic and obliterate the crushing debts and dislocations of the revolutionary war.


1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW J. O'SHAUGHNESSY

British colonial policy initiatives of the 1760s and the American revolutionary war led to a period of sustained lobbying by the West India interest in Britain; lobbying which developed from an informal body into a more professionally organized lobby, along the lines of modern economic interest groups. The composition of the lobby and its activities during the revolutionary period are examined here. Its considerable influence is also assessed and explained. The article finds that the lobby won major concessions from the British government and vitally affected British policy towards North America. It nevertheless concludes that the lobby enjoyed its greatest influence in the early century when ironically its organization was weaker but its goals coincided more harmoniously with those of British colonial policy. Its later reorganization was a response to the increasing conflicts of interest between the white elites of the British Caribbean and the mother country which intensified during the period of the American revolution and its aftermath.


Author(s):  
Christopher Curry

In the introduction, Christopher Curry provides a theoretical foundation for the thematic chapters that follow. He discusses the notion that the Bahamas represents a unique geo-political space settled by loyalists at the end of the American Revolution. Racial identities inscribed in law, customs, and practices became the source of friction between black and white loyalists in the Bahamas. Such friction in fact was initiated during the course of the Revolutionary War but was amplified in the Bahamas due to competing aspirations. One group was seeking greater freedom under the protection of British promises and proclamations; and the other, already possessing liberty, was attempting to gain economic advantages as potential slave-owning planters. Curry argues that black loyalists were cultural carriers of a revolutionary movement reflected in their attitudes to work, demands for freedom, and their efforts to establish important religious and social institutions.


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