American Revolution Research Articles

An Expansion Of Liberty

This primary source analysis examines the relationship between church and state in early American society from the point of view of the anonymous pamphlet, The Freeman’s Remonstrance Against an Ecclesiastical Establishment, being some remarks On a Late Pamphlet, Entitled The Necessity OfAn Established Church In Any State; By A Freeman Of Virginia. written in 1777. The Freeman uses many ideas from the American Revolution such as American unity, the expansion of liberty, and expansion ofequality to argue for disestablishment. This topic is important because of the ever-evolving debate over church and state in the United States.  

Above the Law: From Medieval England to Trump v. the United States

Abstract There is nothing unprecedented about prosecuting Donald Trump. While it’s certainly true that no president has (yet) to be indicted, if we look at to the long stretch of English political-legal history, we find many precedents. Because what happened in England fueled the American Revolution and the Framers’ view of the chief executive. As Richard II and Charles I discovered to their cost, acting as if they were above the law could lead to their deposition and eventual death, and the framers agreed. Thomas Jefferson asserted in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), retained “the powers of punishment or removal” of their rulers. Holding the chief executive, whether a king, a prime minister, or a president is irrelevant, to account for alleged crimes is, as the phrase goes, baked into American constitutional law. But the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise. The president now enjoys the immunity Charles I claimed. We are now at the cusp of something without precedent: an absolutist presidency.

TRACING AMERICAN SPIRIT IN INDONESIA’S INDEPENDENCE: A HISTORICAL-COMPARATIVE STUDY

The US and Indonesia, two countries that fought for freedom, are fascinating subjects to delve more into, despite their great distance from one another and their distant times of conflict. This research used a Transnational American Studies perspective and comparative-historical analysis. By using comparative historical analysis, this research aimed to explore the similarities and differences that exist in the journey of American independence and Indonesian independence. The results of this research showed that even though the independence movements in the US and Indonesia occurred several centuries apart, they had the same goal, namely opposing colonialism. Both showed the same enthusiasm to fight colonial power and the desire to determine the fate of their nation without interference from other parties. Thomas Paine and Bung Tomo through their writings and speeches led the spirit of independence in the US and Indonesia. Even though they use different communication styles, both have an impact in forming the spirit of resistance and unity of their nation. Additionally, by looking at the history of the struggle of the Indonesian people, it can be seen the spirit of freedom that the US promoted.

History of the Yale Peabody Museum Invertebrate Paleontology Collection

While the Yale Peabody Museum itself did not exist as an entity until 1866, the collections that are its core have been on campus much longer. Yale College had a cabinet of natural wonders including zoological oddities (a taxidermied two-headed calf), anthropological material (wooden shoes from France and China), and other interesting items (including a bottle of water from the Ganges River) (Narendra 1979) dating back to the American Revolution and the late 1700s. This “Cabinet of Yale College” had been housed in multiple places around campus prior to the construction of the Peabody Museum. Some of the earliest collections came from exchanges between Benjamin Silliman (Anonymous 2024b) and Gideon Mantell (Anonymous 2024c), two well-known scientists of the early 1800s. It was not until 1876, when the first Peabody Museum building opened, that the museum had its own space Suppl. material 1. The appointment of paleontologist Charles Beecher (Anonymous 2024a) in 1888 gave the invertebrate paleontology collection its first dedicated staff member. Under Beecher the collections continued to grow with multiple accessions from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. By the late 1860s, fossils from the American West were being shipped back to Yale by train. Dinosaurs described by O. C. Marsh (Anonymous 2024d) are the most well-known (particularly Brontosaurus, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus), but the invertebrate paleontology division received extensive collections of Western Interior Seaway specimens from the central portion of the United States. Charles Schuchert took over the division in 1904, bringing with him an extensive collection of brachiopods, which he continued to expand over his lifetime. Graduate student dissertation collections significantly added to the growth of the museum's holdings throughout the twentieth century. Significant additions in the last quarter century include the Samuel J. Ciurca (Anonymous 2024e) eurypterid collection, an Early Ordovician Fezouata Formation Lagerstätte collection, the CLIMAP (Climate: Long range Investigation, Mapping, And Prediction (Anonymous 2024f)) collection of Foraminifera slides and vials, and an incredibly diverse collection of Green River Formation insects (all of the catalogued specimens in these collections can be found on our search portal. Many fossils are on display in the newly renovated Yale Peabody Museum, which reopened in April of 2024 (Suppl. material 1).

Constituting the Body of State: Paper, Parchment, and Political Thought in the Age of the American Revolution

Abstract This essay considers the material and visual cultural dynamics through which the modern state emerged during the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world. It centres upon the emergent rhetoric of the ‘written constitution’ in Revolutionary North America and the new United States, arguing that this mode of constitution-making represented not the invention that many claimed it to be, but instead a revision of the relationship between document, statecraft and the body in early modern British empire that built upon seventeenth-century English critics of monarchical power. The continuities between the material substrates of empire and nation came to be masked by a rhetoric of disavowal that posited the US constitutional form as both an innovation and a template for the material entanglements of the modern state.

The Law of Nations in the Diplomacy of the American Revolution

Abstract Historians have long known that leaders of the American Revolution looked to the law of nations for insight into the rights and obligations of independent states. In so doing, Americans relied largely on the writings of European legal theorists, such as Hugo Grotius and Emerich de Vattel, whose treatises on the law of nations are regarded today as having laid the foundations of international law. As this article demonstrates, however, early modern statesmen did not base their conduct on such treatises, but on a customary law of nations that they derived from precedent and the text of earlier treaties. This article elucidates the distinction between the customary and theoretical branches of the law of nations. It then goes on to examine the law of nations’ impact on revolutionary-era diplomacy, drawing particular attention to a series of wartime negotiations over rights to the Mississippi River. As the article shows, most American emissaries lacked experience with the customary laws of diplomacy and struggled to use that law effectively in their negotiations. The most serious consequences were averted due in part to French legal advice, and because one American, John Jay, acquired enough competence in customary law to guide his colleagues toward an effective negotiation of peace.

Based on a True Story Remembering the American Revolution through Film

Based on a True Story Remembering the American Revolution through Film

What were the different roles women played during the American Revolution?

PurposeThrough the approach presented here, the authors created an investigation, utilizing the SOURCES Framework for Teaching with Primary and Secondary Sources, to allow their students to better understand that many people, specifically many dynamic women from diverse backgrounds, played vital roles, individually and collectively, in the fight for independence and, ultimately, the creation of the United States of America.Design/methodology/approachThe SOURCES Framework for Teaching with Primary and Secondary Sources is a framework that was developed to scaffold the learning process for students to replicate that which is done by historians. This approach allows students in the classroom, in a structured manner, to analyze primary and secondary sources in authentic and engaging ways in pursuit of answers to an essential question, and others of interest to each student, regarding historical events, controversy, etc. This process empowers students to think critically, weigh various perspectives and accounts and to develop their own evidence-based response to an essential question that is central to guiding and driving inquiry.FindingsThrough the analysis of primary and secondary sources related to women’s roles and efforts during the American Revolution, students were able to develop their own evidence-based narratives to answer the essential question of “What were the different roles women played during the American Revolution?”Originality/valueThe authors of the manuscript outline a unique approach to teaching students about the importance of women to the independence efforts in the United States during the late 18th century. Teachers of all grade levels and various content can modify and adapt the methods and resources presented here.

Le mythe de la Pennsylvanie, l’Histoire des deux Indes et les Recherches sur les États-Unis de Filippo Mazzei

The “Myth of Pennsylvania,” an overly idealized representation of Pennsylvania, its founder William Penn, and the Quakers, was embraced by many 18th-century French philosophes. It appears in Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters (1734), Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-65), and most prominently in Raynal’s influential History of the East and West Indies (1780). According to the myth, Penn’s colony offered an image of the Golden Age and a model of good government. William Penn was portrayed as a great legislator who established a popular representative government and gave laws that guaranteed civil liberties, maintained equality and ensured religious tolerance. As for the Quakers, their morals and customs were deemed to revive the virtues of early Christians. However, around the time of the American Revolution, many liberal intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic responded critically to such idealistic distortions of American reality, no matter how well intended. Filippo Mazzei, a naturalized American citizen from Italy who played an important role in the War of Independence, is a good case in point. In the third of his four-volume Researches on the United States (1788), Mazzei develops an extended refutation of Raynal’s version of the myth of Pennsylvania. Penn is now depicted as a greedy, sly opportunist who mostly looked after his own interests and those of his family. Similarly, the Quakers are criticized for having always deftly advanced their own political and commercial interests, and for not having clearly supported the Revolution. Mazzei—and his friends Jefferson and Condorcet, who collaborated with him on the Researches in Paris—could only feel irritated by the propagation of utopian myths or fanciful notions about America when the goal of the Revolution was to establish a large modern republic founded upon human rights and a complex legal and constitutional apparatus. Refuting the myth of Pennsylvania meant also discrediting the outdated ideals of the philosopher king and the primitive virtuous utopia.

Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

Grace Lee Boggs on Chinese Political Thought and the Next American Revolution

Grace Lee Boggs on Chinese Political Thought and the Next American Revolution

Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City by Christopher F. Minty (review)

Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City by Christopher F. Minty (review)

Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and Political Violence in Latin America during the Long 1960s

Abstract The article reflects on the strategies of political violence used by Latin American revolutionary and counterrevolutionary actors during the long 1960s. It argues that the notions and practices of political violence used by revolutionary actors were adapted to different social, cultural and geographical realities, so there was no single strategic definition. In the case of the counterrevolution, its practices of violence were mostly linked to state apparatuses and structures, without which its expansion and survival within the public space would have been more difficult.

The Influential Influenza: The "Russian Catarrh" Pandemic of 1781-1782.

The influenza pandemic of 1781-1782 was remarkably well-documented, with investigations and treatment records produced in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia. Everyone agreed that outbreak began in St. Petersburg in December 1781 and then spread across northern Europe, but the medical communities' consensus did not solve all issues. Two questions would inspire years of debate. The first concerned the transmission vector of the pandemic: was it the result of neo-Hippocratic, miasmatic, or contagionist exposure? This was perhaps the greatest concern of the late-eighteenth century, and multiple physicians hoped the latest influenza pandemic could provide an answer. The second was no less difficult - where did the disease originate? This was not only because geography affected both prophylactic measures and treatment options but also produced diplomatic and commercial consequences. Was a quarantine necessary, preventing commercial exchanges? Did the risk of infection result in peace negotiations being delayed, potentially extending the American Revolution and the ongoing naval conflict in the Atlantic? Even if a consensus could be reached that this was a "Russian" catarrh, this would not resolve the method of disease transmission. The pandemic of 1781-1782 was not a turning point in the arguments among neo-Hippocratic, miasmatic, and contagionist physicians, but rather reveals all three positions could be held simultaneously.

The Spiritual Journey of Chinese Americans Viewed from the Cultural Connotation of The Joy Luck Club

Chinese-American writers who live in both Chinese and American cultures are the most sensitive to cultural conflict and integration. Amy Tan is one of those writers who probe deeply into the relationship between the Chinese and American cultures. The Joy Luck Club, a novel that tells stories of four Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters, has caused a great sensation inside and outside the United States and made Tan a famous writer. From the perspective of intercultural communication, Cultural conflicts between four couples of mother and daughter, between husbands and wives arising from the difference in cultural background are looked into from the angles of Chinese obedience to parents and American independence and democracy, Chinese women’s submissiveness and American women’s independence, Chinese family’s honor and American individual achievement, Chinese high-context culture and American low- context culture, Chinese superstition and American science. The causes of the conflicts are also discussed in the aspects of Chinese culture and American culture. Chinese mothers are deeply influenced by the concept of "Three Obedience and Four Virtues", "Resign oneself to Adversity", Etc. However, American daughters are born in the culture that emphasizes "Individualism, Equality, Independence and Freedom." In this thesis, it is also put forward that despite the conflicts, mutual compatibility of two cultures is unavoidable and an inescapable tendency, which reflects the development from the clash to the coexistence of the two cultures in the context of globalization.

"The Disagreeable Situation in between the Civil in the Military": Prisoners of War and Local Governance in the American Revolution

"The Disagreeable Situation in between the Civil in the Military": Prisoners of War and Local Governance in the American Revolution

Women Waging War in the American Revolution

Women Waging War in the American Revolution

Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution

Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution

The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution

The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution

Writing and Sensory Knowledge in a Rural Clinical Practice

Abstract: This article is a case study of the Connecticut surgeon, Albigence Waldo, which examines the roles that writing, sensory knowledge, and emotions played in his medical practice as a rural clinician in New England before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War. It demonstrates how surgeons of the time used various forms of writing, as well as knowledge gained from experience, sensory impressions, and emotions to inform their approach to patients and practices of healing.