The American Revolution Reborn: Power and the American Revolution Recap

Welcome to Part 5 of my Revolution Reborn Conference Recap. (See Part 1: Opening Roundtable Part 2: Global Perspectives Part 3: The Revolution as Civil War Part 4: Violence and the American Revolution)

Power and the American Revolution

Chair: Woody Holton

Panelists:

Mark Boonshoft, “‘Calculated to Awake their Boyish Emulation’: The Great Awakening, Academies, and the American Revolution"

Matthew Spooner (Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University), “Disorder, Slave Property, and Economic Development in the Revolutionary South”

Bryan Rosenblithe (Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University), “Where Tyranny Begins: British Imperial Expansion and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1758-1766”

Biggest Takeaway: Power further complicates the story of the American Revolution. Historians need to address the experiences of the poor, elite, loyalists, revolutionaries, disaffected, slaves, and imperial viewpoints when they discuss power and the Revolution.

Biggest Question: How do scholars frame a narrative of the Revolution to include the experiences of the educated elite, slaves, and the implications of European imperial politics?

Panel Summary

Boonshoft wanted to show how the Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies set the stage for the Revolution. Until now historians have promulgated the view that the Awakening affected the Revolution by democratizing political relations. However, Boonschoft sees the Awakening as giving rise to a group of elitist conservatives, not democratic insurgents. The Awakening did not democratize social relations. Education lay at the heart of many of the constitutional disputes during the Revolution. The Revolution proved a signal moment in the lives of the Revolutionary generation because the Revolution allowed them to take the reins of power.

Spooner argued that southern society amplified the power, messiness, disorder, disaffection, and violence of the American Revolution. Scholars will be able to see both the promise and the limits of the Revolution if they study the South. Spooner also pointed out that the present historiography contains books about the Revolution and books about slavery. He would like to see slavery included in historians’ narratives about the Revolution.

Rosenblithe proposed extending the periodization of the Revolution to the 1750s. The British acquisition of territory during the French and Indian War effected how people looked at imperial politics. These views indicate that the Peace of Paris 1763 proved tenuous at best. The Revolution was a moment of imperial rupture. Scholars must deepen their understanding of eighteenth-century European imperial politics to understand the Revolution as a crisis of empire.

Official Commentary

Annette Gordon-Reed

David Shields

Gordon-Reed admitted that with all of the new scholarship coming out, she thought that the Revolution had already been reborn. Gordon-Reed believes that this new scholarship is important because most people do not really think of, or see, the tragedy of the Revolution. Historians need to unpack white supremacy as they craft their new narrative. Gordon-Reed noted that she has seen new African emigrants to the United States write that they are white on documents because being white means something.

Shields remarked that the concept of power haunted the imaginations of human beings on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the Age of Revolutions. He drew attention to the fact that Michael Zuckerman opted to call the conference “Revolution Reborn,” which has a biological connotation rather than “Revolution Rebooted,” which is technical.

Sampling of Question & Answer Remarks

Question: What do you think of the power of leadership when it comes to winning the Revolutionary War?

Boonshoft answered that leadership was important. Revolutions have leaders and leaders come out of revolutions. Boonshoft does not want to displace stories of the messiness of the Revolution, or the stories about a bottom-up movement, but he believes that leaders and elites had a place in the Revolution and that historians should be attuned to the people who constrained, and were constrained, by the people below them.

Edward Countryman believes that scholars have not ignored the South. He asked how scholars could ignore it when the South produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others of their ilk. However, historians do not know enough about the enslaved in the south and they need to investigate these faceless and obscure people in more detail.

Question: What do you think a new interpretation of the Revolution would look like with slavery at its center? What are the implications of this new slavery-centered narrative for the Revolutionary narrative of the New England and Middle Colonies?

Spooner answered that scholars have to center the story of slavery and the Revolution in the south because the South centered on slavery.

Rosenblithe offered that any re-framing of the narrative must look at the whole imperial system, where scholars will find that New England’s revolution was tied to the West Indies.

Tomorrow: Recap of the Concluding Roundtable

Congratulations! You are almost there, just one recap post left.

Feel free to agree or engage with the points and questions raised in this conference by leaving a comment.

*Please note that I updated the summary of Mark Boonshoft's comments. June 9, 2013 @ 11:28am.

The American Revolution Reborn: Violence and the Revolution Recap

Welcome to Part 4 of my Revolution Reborn Conference Recap. (See Part 1: Opening Roundtable Part 2: Global Perspectives Part 3: The Revolution as Civil War.)

Violence and the Revolution

Panelists

Chair: Michael Zuckerman

Zara Anishanslin, “‘This is the Skin of a Whit Man’: Visual Memory and the Materiality of Violence in the American Revolution”

Denver Brunsman, “‘Executioners of their Friends and Brethren’: Naval Impressment as an Atlantic Civil War”

David Hsiung, “Environmental History and the Revolution: Gunpowder as a Test Case”

Biggest Takeaway: The American Revolution is a compelling story that never goes away. However, scholars need to find ways to work the violence of the Revolutionary War into their narratives.

Biggest Question: How can historians get at and understand the violence of the American Revolution?

Pannel Summary

Anishanslin urged historians to grapple with how colonists experienced, saw, and witnessed the Revolution. Anishanslin believes that material culture offers the best way to understand and interpret the violence of the war; most Americans get their history from historic sites not archives. Americans will better understand that the War for Independence was a bloody, violent civil war if historians and museums can discuss how material culture contains the violence of the war.

Brunsman found that the British Royal Navy impressed tens of thousands of men and yet experienced a low rate of desertion: 7% during the Napoleonic wars. Impressed men stayed in the Navy because of naval discipline, the danger of the high seas, and the fact that sailors took pride in their work. However, the American Revolution caused desertion rates to double to 14%; most sailors deserted within the first year of their service. Brunsman attributed higher desertion rates to longer periods in American ports & ideology; sailors did not want to fight their American brethren.

Hsiung suggested how scholars might use environmental history perspectives to study the American Revolution. Ecologists discuss edge zones: transition zones between habitats, such as forests and fields, where sunlight, moisture, wind speed, and other variables differ from those in a habitat. Several animals thrive in edge zones, like raccoons. Hsiung proposed that historians use the concept of edge zones to study patriots, loyalists, & neutrals. Did communities have patriots, neutrals, or loyalists who thrived in the edge zones of loyalty? A place where they comfortably interacted with people of different loyalties.

Official Commentary

Margaretta Lovell

Marcus Rediker

Peter Thompson

Lovell discussed how material culture can provide evidence that can teach scholars something significant when the written record is silent or ambiguous. Artists such as John Singleton Copley & John Trumbull were not more ideologically confused or more financially conspicuous than other craftsmen, but they had chameleon loyalties because of their art. Copley painted portraits of loyalists during the war and Trumbull homage to American victories. Artists helped to fix the public memory of the Revolution and its cast of characters.

Rediker counseled that historians face 2 dilemmas as they re-birth scholarship on the American Revolution: 1. If 60% of the people in the Revolution were disaffected and 20% were loyalists, scholars need to analyze and understand how the patriots achieved their wildly improbable victory. 2. When the new narrative of the American Revolution emerges it will prove completely unacceptable to the political majority of the United States because the new narratives will be insufficiently patriotic.

Thompson views academic historians as a suburban bunch who possess the colossal arrogance to say that they know about the violence involved in the Revolution. An outlier of this false consciousness is the untested conviction that successful revolutions need internal enemies. Historians don’t have a handle on why the Revolution was so violent and they need to grapple with that question. Thompson also advocated that scholars revisit the terminology they use when they describe violence.

Sampling of Question & Answer Remarks

Aaron Fogleman reminded attendees that America was a violent society and that early Americans were used to warfare, slavery, & other types of violence before the Revolution brought intense civil war.

Judith Van Buskirk asked how 20% of the population made a Revolution. She would like to see more work done on power and how people exercised power during the Revolution. Van Buskirk also mentioned types of power: coercion, persuasion, manipulation, and the imposition of norms on a community.

William Pencak suggested that lack of opportunity caused the Revolution. People could not find opportunities out west because the British shut off access beyond the Appalachian mountains. The British Navy also controlled the sea lanes, which blocked Americans from achieving full access to the opportunities of the sea.

Thompson: Remorse. A study of regret in the Revolution would make a good dissertation topic.

Tomorrow: Recap of the Power and Revolution panel

Please leave a comment if you would like to engage with the points and questions raised by this conference.

The American Revolution Reborn: The Revolution as Civil War Recap

Part 3 of my Revolution Reborn Conference Recap. (See Part 1: Opening Roundtable & Part 2: Global Perspectives)

Revolution as Civil War

Chair: Barbara Oberg

Panelists:

Travis Glasson, "Intimacies of Occupation: Fraternization, Compromise, and Betrayal in Revolutionary-era Newport"

Michael McDonnell, “The Other Three Fifths: Neutrals in the American Revolution”

Kimberly Nath, “Loyalism, Citizenship, American Identity: The Shoemaker Family”

Aaron Sullivan (Ph.D. Candidate, Temple University), “In but not of the Revolution: Neutrals and British-Occupied Philadelphia”

Biggest Takeaway: Historians need to get at how civilians experienced the Revolutionary War. They also need to include the largest demographic in their war narratives: the Disaffected.

Biggest Question: How can scholars get at the civilian and disaffected experience?

Panel Summary

Glasson would like to know more about the civilian experience during the Revolutionary War. In Newport, R.I., civilians lived alongside several thousand British and Hessian troops for 3 years and among several thousand French troops prior to Yorktown. Civilians and soldiers befriended each other, offended each other, & formed grudges against each other. Newport had a lot of people who did not fit neatly into the patriot or loyalist camps. Scholars need to place more emphasis on the people in the middle, the disaffected and show how people’s political opinions changed throughout the war.

McDonnell sees the Revolutionary War as a civil war. Historians generally leave loyalists, Native Americans, African-Americans, and other opponents of the patriots out of their Revolutionary War narratives. They also leave out Americans who tried to take a middle path. Invariably divisions among Americans prolonged the war. The war and disaffection gave rise to new divisions between the states and between state and continental officials who felt that they had given more than others to the war. The Revolutionary War heightened localism rather than nationalism.

Nath studied the Shoemaker Family of Philadelphia to illuminate the loyalist experience during the war and what happened to those who returned home after the war. She argued that American citizenship came to be defined by what it was not rather than what it was. Citizens were not loyalists.

Sullivan believes that contemporaries and later scholars left the disaffected out of their narratives because disaffection comprises a tough rallying cry. The disaffected outnumbered the patriots. Sullivan also noted the intolerance of the disaffected towards the Revolution; the patriots angered the disaffected by making participation in the Revolution mandatory.

Official Commentary

Li Jianming (Peking University)

Marjoleine Kars

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich  

Jianming observed that any revolution is a civil war. However, the American Revolution stands as a peculiar one because it occurred in both North America and the British Isles. Ordinary people did not always leave good records and a paucity of sources might cause historians to say more than they should about their experiences. Scholars need to be careful not to lump ordinary people in with the elite as they stood as antagonistic groups during the Revolution.

Kars reflected on how scholars know more about revolutionary leaders than about ordinary revolutionaries. The same stands true of slave rebellions, especially the one in Haiti. Many runaway slaves hid from rebels and masters alike during the slave rebellion in Berbice. Such evidence suggests that we need to look at the motivations and ideology of slaves. We need to write narratives that focus on the effects of revolution on the local community, not on the rhetoric of liberty.

Ulrich discussed how Americans look upon the Revolution as a positive term because “revolution” means a life cycle; a revolution might be something Americans want to experience again. “Civil war” denotes something negative and ugly. Americans don’t want to repeat civil wars. The American Revolution was a destructive civil war. People lost the things they cared about most during the war: people & property.

Sampling of Question & Answer Remarks

Thomas Slaughter: The biggest problem facing scholars: as messy as the American Revolution was its settlement was stunningly peaceful. Scholars need to answer why that came about.

Sullivan: When we look at the Revolution today, we focus on the group of people caught in the middle. We talk about refugees & the victims of war. A new narrative of the American Revolution might look more like how we describe present-day revolutions in places like Syria.

Brendan McConville: Neutralism may have meant more than “I don’t want to get shot at or die.” Neutralism may have a positive ideological nature that we just can’t get at.

Tomorrow: Recap of the Violence and the American Revolution panel

Feel free to agree or engage with the points and questions raised in this conference by leaving a comment.

The American Revolution Reborn: Global Perspectives Recap

The 2nd post in my 6 post series recapping the American Revolution Reborn Conference (Part 1: Opening Roundtable)

Global Perspectives on the American Revolution

Chair: Andrew O’Schaughnessy

Panelists

Kate Carte Engel (Southern Methodist University), “Transatlantic Protestantism and the Challenge of the Revolution”

Caitlin Fitz, “The United States in the Age of Revolutions: A Reconsideration”

Aaron Fogleman: “The Changing Nature of Transatlantic Migration in the Age of Revolution”

Ned Landsman: “British Union and American Revolution: Unions, Sovereignty, and the Multinational State”

Biggest Takeaway: Scholars should study the Revolution in a global context because it is useful to compare American experiences with those in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, & South America.

Biggest Question: Should we expand our periodization of the American Revolution to cover the years 1760 to 1825?

Panel Summary

Engal advocated for more studies that use religion to understand the American Revolution. Up until now the story of the founding has been largely secular, but what happens if we look at the Revolution through the lens of Protestantism? What were the implications of the Revolution for religion?

Fitz would like to see the periodization of the Revolution expanded to 1775-1825. This periodization allows scholars to compare the American Revolution with Latin & South American revolutions. This comparison deepens our understanding of American republicanism and ways of thinking. As Latin & South American countries declared independence they passed legal measures that ended slavery and promoted racial equality. Americans followed these actions in newspapers and no one reacted because the distance of South America from the United States rendered South American events abstract concepts.

Fogleman has found that immigration throughout the Atlantic was much higher from 1777 on than previously expected. Fogleman does not believe in the notion that the Revolution secured slavery and increased racism. When Fogleman studied the American Revolution in the Atlantic context, he found that slavery declined from its 1760s numbers during and after the Revolution.

Landsman believes that American historians have not sufficiently attended to the British aspect of the British Empire. Imperial reformers looked at including the 13 colonies in the formal 1707 union, but by 1763 the Americans had so much sovereignty that the British had little left to give to make the union appealing, aside from the sovereignty of Parliament. Reformers discussed the idea of eventually moving the imperial capital to North America, but British officials were wary of making any concessions that might suggest that the imperial capital would move, especially when America seemed to be pursuing a Republican path.

Official Panel Commentary

Linda Colley

Edward Countryman

Christine Heyrman  

Colley found that the panel provided 3 ways to look at how the American Revolution was a manifestation of trends going on around the world.

1.     Landsman reminds us of the issues of sovereignty, empire, & union. C.A. Bailey referred to the post-1750 era as a global crisis when increasingly expensive warfare raised taxes and provoked discussions of governance and rebellion. We have seen this in North America in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, in the Spanish Empire, the Russian Empire, and even in parts of the Mogul Empire.

2.     Fitz shows historians that we need to reexamine the umbrella term “Age of Revolution.” However, scholars can equally argue that the Age of Revolution was also an Age of Empire. The British Empire became reinvigorated by its defeat. New empires emerged, such as the Napoleonic, Brazillian, & new American empires.

3.     To properly re-birth the American Revolution, both American and British historians need to stop behaving as though the links between their respective societies ended in 1783.

Countryman posited that when scholars look at colonial America they see neo-Europes. However, colonial America had more going on than European settlement. Neo-Europes had a lot of Africans and scholars need to look beyond the neo-Europes to study those Africans. Contestation between European and Native American claimants of North America defines a colonial order that was not just an extension of European order. Countryman also believes that the biggest change wrought by the Revolution was the entry of the young United States into the Westphalian state system.

Heyrman believes that Protestant Nationalism & Internationalism peaked together just after the Revolution. Immigration from Ireland and elsewhere caused the remolding of Protestantism around the Atlantic and animus to Catholicism emerged as a necessary aspect of Protestantism.

Sampling of Question & Answer Remarks

Fogleman argued that slavery experienced the most security before the Revolution. The Revolution created a problem for slavery as it pointed towards emancipation. After the Revolution, slaveholders had to argue the positive good of slavery because others argued that slavery was bad.

Engal believes that scholars should shrink the Revolutionary period to 1763-1792 or 1774-1792. This periodization would allow historians to focus on what really happened during the war without having to study how a particular aspect of the Revolution played out over time. Expanding the Revolutionary periodization is also important, but the two goals should be separate: One group should look at the war and a second group should see how the Revolution played out.

Fogleman: The Revolution was not particularly religious in its causes, but the Revolution happened to a religious people. Americans' religion effected the way they viewed the Revolution and this should be studied.

Tomorrow: Recap of the American Revolution as Civil War

Feel free to agree or engage with the points and questions raised by this conference by leaving a comment.

The American Revolution Reborn: Opening Roundtable

Today I depart from my regular post schedule to bring you a 6 post series recapping the American Revolution Reborn Conference, the first conference dedicated to the American Revolution since the Bicentennial. The conference took place in Philadelphia between Thursday May 30 and Saturday June 1. Nearly 300 people attended. Academics, public historians, and enthusiasts alike contributed to the conversation, which centered on 4 themes: Global Perspectives on the American Revolution, the American Revolution as a Civil War, Violence and the American Revolution, & Power and the American Revolution. Roundtable discussions opened and closed the conference.

I hope that these posts will add more context and depth to the tweets attendees sent from the conference. (Michael D. Hattem has storifyed the tweets). Between today and Monday, I will post brief summaries of each panel and roundtable. This conference raised a number of questions and points that scholars of the American Revolution should be aware of.

Opening Roundtable

Moderator: Daniel Richter

Discussants: Jane Kamensky & Edward Gray

Biggest Takeaway: The ideological and social arguments of the American Revolution explain why the Revolution happened. Scholars must study how it happened to “rebirth” the study of the Revolution.

Biggest Question: Should new scholarship ignore ideology or use it as a tool to get at how the Revolution happened and how contemporaries conducted the war and politics?

Panel Summary

Since the 1960s nearly all scholarly and popular works portray the American Revolution as either a story of how the colonists conducted a revolution of ideas or how poor, downtrodden colonists caused the Revolution by advocating and pushing for social change. Kamensky, Gray, and other audience members advocated that new scholarship on the Revolution should depart from the old historiography. Kamensky & Gray took the first steps in their [amazon_link id="0199746702" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution[/amazon_link]; none of its 632 pages discuss ideology.

Sampling of Audience Remarks

Thomas Slaughter questioned whether there has ever been a debate surrounding the Revolution. He believes that scholars will need to grapple with power, gender, class, slavery, and the larger problems of the British empire to create better narratives. Historians will also need to engage and debate the ideological argument.

Linda Colley would like historians to compare the American Revolution with other revolutions. Comparison will allow scholars to see new avenues of exploration for their topics.

Fredrika Teute believes that historians need to wrap their minds around the reality and rhetoric of enslavement. Neither the ideological nor the social history-centered narratives knew how to incorporate and deal with slavery.

Tomorrow: Recap of the Global Perspectives panel

Feel free to agree or engage with the points and questions raised by this conference by leaving a comment.