Download or read book European Friends of the American Revolution written by Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe’s crucial contribution to the achievement of American independence. American independence would not have been achieved without diplomatic, financial, and military support from Europe. And without recognition from powerful European nations, the young country would never have assumed an independent status "amongst the powers of the earth." This collection of essays not only offers new glimpses into the ways in which various European powers and actors enabled American patriots to fight and win the war, it also highlights the American Revolution’s short- and long-term impact on the Atlantic world. Because of the strength of European support, Great Britain found itself diplomatically isolated, without an ally in a war that had become a global conflict, and with a navy outnumbered by the combined fleets of America’s friends. This volume is a timely reminder of the importance of international support for the winning of American independence and the global context of the American Revolution as we approach its 250th anniversary. Contributors: Olivier Chaline, Sorbonne Université * Robert Rhodes Crout, College of Charleston * Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * Victor Enthoven, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam * Paul A. Gilje, University of Oklahoma * Jean-Marie Kowalski, Sorbonne Université * Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, University of Virginia * Julia Osman, Mississippi State University * Munro Price, University of Bradford * Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia, Senior Spanish diplomat * John A. Ragosta, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello * Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Université Paris Cité * Timothy D. Walker, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Download or read book The Impact of the American Revolution Abroad written by Library of Congress and published by The Minerva Group, Inc.. This book was released on 2002 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may prevail in all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, This is my country." With this quotation from Benjamin Franklin, historian Richard Morris, Columbia University, opened the fourth Library of Congress Symposium on the American Revolution, held May 8 and 9, 1975, in the Librarys Coolidge Auditorium. For Americans, the Revolution brought independence, nationhood, a constitution clearly defining the relations of the state to the people, and reforms in social and economic equality. But what did it mean to the rest of the late 18th century world? Some answers to this question are found in the papers published in this volume. Following a comprehensive survey of the impact of the American Revolution abroad, by R. R. Palmer of Yale University, leading historians consider its effect on specific countries. France is discussed by Charles Fohlen of the University of Paris-Sorbonne; the Dutch Republic by J. W. Schulte Nordholt of the State University of Leiden; Great Britain by J. H. Plumb of Christs College, Cambridge; the Russian Empire by N. N. Bolkhoitinov of the Instittue of General History, Academy of Sciences of the USSR; the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world by Mario Rodriguez of the University of Southern California; and Ireland by Owen Dudley Edwards of the University of Edinburgh. Concluding the volume are commentaries on the American Revolution in relation to Germany, Japan, and Spain by Erich Angermann of the University of Cologne, Nagayo Homina of the University of Tokyo, and Ignacio Rubio Mañe, Archivist of Mexico.

Download or read book British Friends of the American Revolution written by Jerome R. Reich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1998 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reich demonstrates how a mixture of political expediency, constitutional scruples, and a desire for reform at home led prominent British politicians, economists, and leaders of public opinion to sympathize with the colonial point of view after 1776. This book is ideal as a supplementary text for courses in colonial American history, the American Revolution, and U.S. constitutional history.

Download or read book Europeans Observe the American Revolution written by Marian R. Brown and published by Julian Messner. This book was released on 1976 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the American Revolution as observed by Europeans in this country at the time using excerpts from their diaries, journals, pamphlets, debates, letters, and articles.

Download or read book Independence Lost written by Kathleen DuVal and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rising-star historian offers a significant new global perspective on the Revolutionary War with the story of the conflict as seen through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award • Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey History Prize • Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Now, in Independence Lost, she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida’s Gulf Coast. While citizens of the thirteen rebelling colonies came to blows with the British Empire over tariffs and parliamentary representation, the situation on the rest of the continent was even more fraught. In the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish forces clashed with Britain’s strained army to carve up the Gulf Coast, as both sides competed for allegiances with the powerful Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations who inhabited the region. Meanwhile, African American slaves had little control over their own lives, but some individuals found opportunities to expand their freedoms during the war. Independence Lost reveals that individual motives counted as much as the ideals of liberty and freedom the Founders espoused: Independence had a personal as well as national meaning, and the choices made by people living outside the colonies were of critical importance to the war’s outcome. DuVal introduces us to the Mobile slave Petit Jean, who organized militias to fight the British at sea; the Chickasaw diplomat Payamataha, who worked to keep his people out of war; New Orleans merchant Oliver Pollock and his wife, Margaret O’Brien Pollock, who risked their own wealth to organize funds and garner Spanish support for the American Revolution; the half-Scottish-Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, who fought to protect indigenous interests from European imperial encroachment; the Cajun refugee Amand Broussard, who spent a lifetime in conflict with the British; and Scottish loyalists James and Isabella Bruce, whose work on behalf of the British Empire placed them in grave danger. Their lives illuminate the fateful events that took place along the Gulf of Mexico and, in the process, changed the history of North America itself. Adding new depth and moral complexity, Kathleen DuVal reinvigorates the story of the American Revolution. Independence Lost is a bold work that fully establishes the reputation of a historian who is already regarded as one of her generation’s best. Praise for Independence Lost “[An] astonishing story . . . Independence Lost will knock your socks off. To read [this book] is to see that the task of recovering the entire American Revolution has barely begun.”—The New York Times Book Review “A richly documented and compelling account.”—The Wall Street Journal “A remarkable, necessary—and entirely new—book about the American Revolution.”—The Daily Beast “A completely new take on the American Revolution, rife with pathos, double-dealing, and intrigue.”—Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution written by Edward G. Gray and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution draws on a wealth of new scholarship to create a vibrant dialogue among varied approaches to the revolution that made the United States. In thirty-three essays written by authorities on the period, the Handbook brings to life the diverse multitudes of colonial North America and their extraordinary struggles before, during, and after the eight-year-long civil war that secured the independence of thirteen rebel colonies from their erstwhile colonial parent. The chapters explore battles and diplomacy, economics and finance, law and culture, politics and society, gender, race, and religion. Its diverse cast of characters includes ordinary farmers and artisans, free and enslaved African Americans, Indians, and British and American statesmen and military leaders. In addition to expanding the Revolution's who, the Handbook broadens its where, portraying an event that far transcended the boundaries of what was to become the United States. It offers readers an American Revolution whose impact ranged far beyond the thirteen colonies. The Handbook's range of interpretive and methodological approaches captures the full scope of current revolutionary-era scholarship. Its authors, British and American scholars spanning several generations, include social, cultural, military, and imperial historians, as well as those who study politics, diplomacy, literature, gender, and sexuality. Together and separately, these essays demonstrate that the American Revolution remains a vibrant and inviting a subject of inquiry. Nothing comparable has been published in decades.

Download or read book The Persistence of Empire written by Eliga H. Gould and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Revolution was the longest colonial war in modern British history and Britain's most humiliating defeat as an imperial power. In this lively, concise book, Eliga Gould examines an important yet surprisingly understudied aspect of the conflict: the British public's predominantly loyal response to its government's actions in North America. Gould attributes British support for George III's American policies to a combination of factors, including growing isolationism in regard to the European continent and a burgeoning sense of the colonies as integral parts of a greater British nation. Most important, he argues, the British public accepted such ill-conceived projects as the Stamp Act because theirs was a sedentary, "armchair" patriotism based on paying others to fight their battles for them. This system of military finance made Parliament's attempt to tax the American colonists look unexceptional to most Britons and left the metropolitan public free to embrace imperial projects of all sorts--including those that ultimately drove the colonists to rebel. Drawing on nearly one thousand political pamphlets as well as on broadsides, private memoirs, and popular cartoons, Gould offers revealing insights into eighteenth-century British political culture and a refreshing account of what the Revolution meant to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Download or read book Unending Passions The Knox Letters written by Pamela Murrow and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Knox was Chief Artillery Officer during the American Revolution and later served as the first Secretary of War. In 1775 he married Lucy Flucker, the daughter of a steadfast Loyalist, Thomas Flucker, Royal Secretary of the Province of Massachusetts. But who were Henry and Lucy Knox? Thus began a quest to learn more about this exceptional couple and in 2010 I discovered a collection of correspondence between Henry and Lucy. This book marks the first published edition of these letters.

Download or read book The American Revolution written by Gordon S. Wood and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2002-03-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic. When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had. No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood’s mastery of his subject, and of the historian’s craft.

Download or read book Our First Civil War written by H. W. Brands and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fast-paced, often riveting account of the military and political events leading up to the Declaration of Independence and those that followed during the war ... Brands does his readers a service by reminding them that division, as much as unity, is central to the founding of our nation."—The Washington Post From best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes a gripping, page-turning narrative of the American Revolution that shows it to be more than a fight against the British: it was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides, Loyalist or Patriot. What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels? That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were the unlikeliest of rebels. Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams might have seemed a more obvious candidate for rebellion, being of cantankerous temperament. Even so, he revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success. Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently. William Franklin might have been expected to join his father, Benjamin, in rebellion but remained loyal to the British. So did Thomas Hutchinson, a royal governor and friend of the Franklins, and Joseph Galloway, an early challenger to the Crown. They soon heard themselves denounced as traitors--for not having betrayed the country where they grew up. Native Americans and the enslaved were also forced to choose sides as civil war broke out around them. After the Revolution, the Patriots were cast as heroes and founding fathers while the Loyalists were relegated to bit parts best forgotten. Our First Civil War reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends.

Download or read book West of the Revolution An Uncommon History of 1776 written by Claudio Saunt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-06-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This panoramic account of 1776 chronicles the other revolutions unfolding that year across North America, far beyond the British colonies. In this unique history of 1776, Claudio Saunt looks beyond the familiar story of the thirteen colonies to explore the many other revolutions roiling the turbulent American continent. In that fateful year, the Spanish landed in San Francisco, the Russians pushed into Alaska to hunt valuable sea otters, and the Sioux discovered the Black Hills. Hailed by critics for challenging our conventional view of the birth of America, West of the Revolution “[coaxes] our vision away from the Atlantic seaboard” and “exposes a continent seething with peoples and purposes beyond Minutemen and Redcoats” (Wall Street Journal).

Download or read book The Counter Revolution of 1776 written by Gerald Horne and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-04-18 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

Download or read book Before the Revolution written by Daniel K. Richter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-03 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation's pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparentÑthat far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoplesÑIndians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, EnglishÑas they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter's epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

Download or read book A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution written by Jonathan R. Dull and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1987-07-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the effect of the American Revolution on European relations, relates American diplomatic efforts to others of the time, and explains why England could not find allies against the colonists

Download or read book Bernardo de G lvez written by Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-23 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States during the American Revolution, its entry into the war definitively tipped the balance against Britain. Led by Bernardo de Galvez, supreme commander of the Spanish forces in North America, their military campaigns against British settlements on the Mississippi River—and later against Mobile and Pensacola—were crucial in preventing Britain from concentrating all its North American military and naval forces on the fight against George Washington's Continental army. In this first comprehensive biography of Galvez (1746@–86), Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia assesses the commander's considerable historical impact and expands our understanding of Spain's contribution to the war. A man of both empire and the Enlightenment, as viceroy of New Spain (1785@–86), Galvez was also pivotal in the design and implementation of Spanish colonial reforms, which included the reorganization of Spain's Northern Frontier that brought peace to the region for the duration of the Spanish presence in North America. Extensively researched through Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives, Quintero Saravia's portrait of Galvez reveals him as central to the histories of the Revolution and late eighteenth-century America and offers a reinterpretation of the international factors involved in the American War for Independence.

Download or read book A Generous and Merciful Enemy written by Daniel Krebs and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some 37,000 soldiers from six German principalities, collectively remembered as Hessians, entered service as British auxiliaries in the American War of Independence. At times, they constituted a third of the British army in North America, and thousands of them were imprisoned by the Americans. Despite the importance of Germans in the British war effort, historians have largely overlooked these men. Drawing on research in German military records and common soldiers’ letters and diaries, Daniel Krebs places the prisoners on center stage in A Generous and Merciful Enemy, portraying them as individuals rather than simply as numbers in casualty lists. Setting his account in the context of British and European politics and warfare, Krebs explains the motivations of the German states that provided contract soldiers for the British army. We think of the Hessians as mercenaries, but, as he shows, many were conscripts. Some were new recruits; others, veterans. Some wanted to stay in the New World after the war. Krebs further describes how the Germans were made prisoners, either through capture or surrender, and brings to life their experiences in captivity from New England to Havana, Cuba. Krebs discusses prison conditions in detail, addressing both the American approach to war prisoners and the prisoners’ responses to their experience. He assesses American efforts as a “generous and merciful enemy” to use the prisoners as economic, military, and propagandistic assets. In the process, he never loses sight of the impact of imprisonment on the POWs themselves. Adding new dimensions to an important but often neglected topic in military history, Krebs probes the origins of the modern treatment of POWs. An epilogue describes an almost-forgotten 1785 treaty between the United States and Prussia, the first in western legal history to regulate the treatment of prisoners of war.

Download or read book America Through European Eyes written by Aurelian Cr_iu_u and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of essays that discuss representative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and English views of American democracy and society, and offer a critical assessment of various narrative constructions of American life, society, and culture"--Provided by publisher.