American War Of Independence Research Articles

1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton

Reviewed by: 1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton Jennifer Dorsey (bio) 1774: The Long Year of Revolution By Mary Beth Norton. New York: Vintage, 2021. 528 pages, 5 3/16" × 8". $18.00 paper. In an 1818 letter to Hezekiah Niles, John Adams drew a careful distinction between the American War of Independence and the American Revolution. He described the revolution not as an event, but as a process that began in the 1760s with the slow but steady “alteration in the religious, moral, political, and social character for the people of thirteen colonies.” The war, by comparison, started with a sudden “burst out in open violence, hostility, and fury” in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775. In her latest history of the American Revolution, Mary Beth Norton affirms Adams’s description of the revolution as a process, but she also significantly shortens the timeline to a single “long year”—1774. She argues that the 1773 Boston Tea Party prompted a popular, colony-wide reappraisal of the constitutional ties that bound America and Great Britain together. When the British Parliament responded to that violent act by shutting down the Boston port, Americans offered a mixed response. On the one hand, they sympathized with the plight of the Bostonians, and they were certain that the Tea Act was bad policy. On the other hand, most Americans beyond Boston did not agree that the same act was unconstitutional or that it required direct action. Rather than join the Bostonians in a fight, Americans spent 1774, the “long year of revolution,” debating—in letters, town hall meetings, newspaper editorials, and political tracts—their thoughts about the British constitution, their place in the imperial system, and their expectations for the future. 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (originally published by Knopf in 2020) reads like a curated collection of these discussion. Norton guides the reader across America to listen in on conversations among family, friends, and neighbors to understand how, in a single year, Americans came to accept revolution and “practice independence in thought and deed” (343). The author of five books on colonial and revolutionary America, including the groundbreaking Liberty’s Daughter: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800, Norton is fluent in the subject matter, and the greatest strength of 1774 is her determination to amplify lesser known or underappreciated voices. Events in Boston drive the chronology of the book, but Norton is mindful of keeping our attention on how men and women across the colonies experienced and discussed the constitutional crisis unfolding before their eyes. [End Page 211] Readers of New York History will be pleased to know that New York City has a special place in Norton’s narrative. Norton states in her introduction that it was her earlier work on Loyalists that convinced her that 1774 was critical to the development of the independence movement. She spotlights the career of loyalist publisher James Rivington to explain what a difference it made that New York City was “the progenitor of public Loyalism.” She argues that Rivington recognized the urgency of providing readers with diverse political perspectives on current events, and he succeeded for some time. The conservative works that he published circulated broadly, and the ideas trickled into popular thinking. The New York–based conservatives also shaped the deliberations of the first Continental Congress. In effect, Rivington’s press forced Americans to question the claims of the revolutionaries. By the end of 1774, Americans did not necessarily agree on how to proceed in the defense of their constitutional rights, but as Norton argues, a consensus emerged among conservatives, moderates, and radicals that “compromise would need to be initiated in the home island, not in North America.” Then, in the early winter of 1775, the colonists learned that King George III had declared his intention to defend parliamentary authority in America. Thereafter, Americans recognized that the die had been cast. Everyone understood that a “bloody rupture” was coming, even if they did not know when. As expected, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution is thoroughly researched and thoughtfully annotated to direct readers to lesser-known sources. Sadly, there are no references to the records held at...

Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones

Reviewed by: Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones Noah Shusterman T. Cole Jones, Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Pp. 336; 11 illus. $39.95 cloth. In the fall of 1776, George Washington received a letter from William Howe criticizing the conditions in which British prisoners of war were being held, including the American practice of holding them in common jails. Such treatment of soldiers, Howe noted, was not in line with the "Custom of War." Nor was it consistent with Washington's own views of how war should be conducted. According to T. Cole Jones, Howe's reproach "hit a nerve" with Washington, for whom "any feeling of indignation was overcome by shame" (100). Washington had hoped to lead a well-trained army in a European-style war against the British army, following the rules of war that prevailed in Europe at the time—norms that included humane treatment of all prisoners, and through which captured officers were freed on their own parole. But the American Revolutionary War was something different. This was in part because the British, at the start, were hesitant to categorize the Americans as enemy soldiers. The British saw the Americans as "rebels" and therefore outside of the rules of war, as they had declared the Jacobites during the 1740s. Over the course of the war, Washington eventually realized that his view of what the war should be was one that few of his fellow Americans shared. Instead, British prisoners who had surrendered under relatively lenient agreements (including at Saratoga and at Yorktown) found themselves facing a population that wanted vengeance. Local governments responsible for keeping the prisoners according to the terms of the surrender agreements had neither the desire nor the funding to do so. Congress accomplished little other than the occasional retroactive rejection of the surrender agreements which, in practice, had long become dead letters. American prisoners, meanwhile, were held in near-starvation conditions in prisons or even on boats anchored offshore, where diseases ran rampant. Though part of the Americans' mistreatment was a result of British disdain for the rebels, they also suffered from Congress's inability to foot the bill for their food and lodging. As the war dragged on, military leaders on both sides hoped for large-scale prisoner exchanges. For a variety of reasons, including confusion on the American side about the respective prerogatives of state, local, and national governments, those exchanges rarely occurred, and the men were left to either wait out the war in prison or escape. Captives of Liberty, which grew out of Jones's doctoral dissertation, is a detailed and thorough history of the way that the British treated their American prisoners of war and, even more, the way that the Americans treated British prisoners. It is divided into five chapters, organized chronologically and following the course of the war. Jones incorporates an impressive amount of evidence. Its most striking passages are also its bleakest, a result of Jones's decision to center "the war and its consequent horrors." Including both large-scale surveys of the sweep of the war and specific vignettes—many of them horrific—Jones traces the history of prisoners from 1775 until 1783, and also shows how violence toward prisoners increased over the course of the war. By the end, during the Southern Campaign, the story is one of "bloodlust" and kangaroo courts, especially in the violence between local loyalists and patriots (202). [End Page 576] There is a curious tension throughout the book, though—almost as if Jones shares some of Washington's disappointment. By the end of the book, after reading about the repeated failures of Congress to arrange any large-scale prisoner transfers, the numerous attacks on British prisoners by their guards or by local patriots, the population's continued calls for retaliation against prisoners of war, and the willingness on so many levels to ignore agreed-upon conditions for the prisoners' surrender, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the war was waged by a bloodthirsty population and...

A War of Information: Spanish Naval Intelligence During the American Revolutionary War (1775–83)

Early-Modern war absorbed large material resources, including manpower, warships, guns, ammunition and supplies, but there was one key element of warfare that was quite immaterial: information. This article analyses Spanish naval intelligence and deals with the production, collection, and management of information within and through the navy. To examine this complex issue this paper will focus on the Spanish naval intelligence system during the American Revolutionary War (1776–83). By the 1770s and the 1780s the Spanish navy had developed and improved an efficient framework that provided decisive information for the mobilisation of its naval forces.

Australia's Entanglement in Global Cotton

Abstract Cotton in Australia has always been entwined with America and England. From the initial stimulus of the American War of Independence to the boost created by the boll weevil outbreak in the 1920s, the fortunes of Australian cotton producers have been shaped by American history as much as their own nation's political and economic imperatives. Scientists and farmers relied on American experience, importing seed, knowledge, personnel, and technology. The global market reflected fluctuations in the US cotton industry and the demands of English cotton mills. Australia relied on the imports of the English cotton mills and an injection of funds by the British Cotton Growing Association (BCGA) in the 1920s to boost industry. While Australian politicians promoted cotton as a domestic economic and demographic stimulant, fulfilment of these nation-state objectives was deeply entangled with, and dependent on, those of America and England.

<i>A Natural Community of Interests and Sympathies</i>: Russia and America in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century

This brief review of the first century of Russian-American relations seeks to explain why the profound conflict between the ideological foundations of the two states — an autocratic empire and a democratic republic — did not hamper the relations between them for a long time. Focusing on such events as the American War of Independence, Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, and the American Civil War, the study, informed by neoclassical realism and philosophy of culture, discusses the logic of political and sociocultural interactions between the two states over a period shaped by great historical upheavals and social transformations. Autocratic Russia despite its ideological basis welcomed the birth of the American republic, helped it to survive, grow, overcome its internal divisions, and rise to a world power status. This seeming paradox is explained primarily by the historical-specific configuration of the national interests of Russia and the USA. The geographical distance between the two countries precluded geopolitical conflicts between them, while Russia’s role in the rivalries between the great powers of Europe corresponded to the geopolitical interests of the USA. Unlike West European powers, Russia did not object to the US drive for hegemony on the American continent, and neither did the US obstruct Russia’s territorial expansion in Eurasia. Geopolitical cooperation was reinforced by the mutual interest in trade. The congruence between the two countries' national interests was discovered during the American War of Independence and continued to exist until the early 20th century. The ruling elites on both sides kept the inherent ideological conflict between Russia and America from undermining the two nations’ cooperation. In times of liberal reforms in Russia, regarded in the US as proof of the universality of American ideas, the ideological conflict seemed to wane, but Russian- American cooperation continued even under more repressive Russian regimes. The situation changed when a combination of international and domestic factors caused frictions between their national interests and spurred their ideological conflict. The two countries’ expansionist drives in the North Pacific region made them rivals in the struggle for regional influence. Meanwhile, turbulent changes in American society in the late 19th – early 20th centuries generated an intensive reaffirmation of the American national creed. The new ideologization of America targeted Russian crisis-stricken tsarism as a system opposed to democratic values. American public opinion shifted from friendship with Russian tsars to advocacy of Russian freedom. This case study contributes insights into the historical evolution of Russian-American relations and the general problem of the role of ideology in international relations.

The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire by Kate Fullagar

Reviewed by: The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire by Kate Fullagar Eric Hinderaker The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire. By kate fullagar. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 320 pp. ISBN 97803000243062. $40.00 (hardcover). Scholars once separated the history of eighteenth-century Britain from that of its colonies, placing each in its own silo and paying relatively little attention to the linkages connecting them. This book argues in favor of connections. In an "experiment in New Biography," Kate Fullagar yokes the lives of three very different men to a meditation on what she calls "the moral legacy of empire" (p. 5). The three men are the Cherokee warrior-diplomat Ostenaco, who traveled to Britain in 1762; Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist who painted his likeness during the visit; and Mai, from the Pacific island of Ra'iatea, who went to Britain in 1774 and stayed two years, during which time he, too, was painted by Reynolds. Other than the fact of these two portraits, there is little that explicitly joins these figures, but in telling their stories, Fullagar hopes to capture the possibilities, limits, contradictions, and ambivalence inherent in Great Britain's far-flung, loose-knit, and often shambolic imperial undertakings. Ostenaco crossed the Atlantic in a fraught era of Cherokee history. His visit to London came on the heels of Cherokee participation in the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War and the destructive Anglo-Cherokee war that punctuated its conclusion, and he returned to his Overhills community in a time of deteriorating relations that culminated in the American War of Independence. After serving for more than a decade as a leading voice in the effort to preserve peace with the neighboring colonies through accommodation and concession, Fullagar argues that—as an aging and increasingly irrelevant figure in the turbulent politics of the Cherokee communities— Ostenaco withdrew from his public role, moved west to the new Cherokee settlements near Chickamauga Creek, and accepted the aggressively defiant leadership that led those communities into the era of the American Revolution. Ostenaco's death is not marked in the surviving documentary record, but Fullagar suggests that he died, as he lived, supporting the interests of Cherokee culture and values. Reynolds, a decade younger than Ostenaco, apprenticed as a portrait painter and gradually rose to prominence in London as a result of hard work and the patronage of well-placed clients. His early portraits focused on imperial figures like the naval officer Augustus Keppel. Fullagar emphasizes two strains in Reynolds's thinking: first, a [End Page 177] conservative neoclassicism that defined his artistic principles; and second, an ambivalence toward empire that was exemplified in his close friendships with both Samuel Johnson, an anti-imperial Tory, and Edmund Burke, a pro-imperial Whig. He was able to balance those friendships, and the values they implied, through his diffident affability, which made Reynolds eminently likeable but also hard to pin down. The book turns on the two portraits at its center: one of Ostenaco, which Fullagar characterizes as a failure and which Reynolds never displayed or sold, the other of Mai, which worked because it abstracted Mai's specific qualities into a more universal, less particularized depiction. This was in keeping with a set of principles Reynolds articulated in a 1776 speech to the Royal Academy of Arts, a body he served as president for more than two decades, in which he discussed and compared the two paintings. Mai—a full two generations younger than Ostenaco—came of age on Ra'iatea at about the same time that it fell to enemies from neighboring Bora Bora and became a dependency. Mai's father was killed, his relatives lost their land, and he ended up in a refugee community on Tahiti. When James Cook visited that island on his second Pacific voyage in 1773, Mai sailed back to London on the Adventure as an able seaman. During the course of a prolonged stay in England, Mai nurtured a plan to return to Ra'iatea with the support of British arms to defeat the Bora Borans and repatriate his home...

Research on the Characteristics of American War Communication Practice and the Impact on Communication Study

Communication now covers every aspect of our lives, and the widespread availability of communication media such as WIFI and mobile phones has led to air becoming intermediation[1]. The unprecedented interest of scholars in new media has overlooked the coherent and complete set of roles and histories behind the act of communication as a necessity of human civilization. To better understand the interaction between communication and society, it is useful to look back at it from a historical perspective as a way of grasping this complex and changing human communication practice. The main object of this study is war in American history, including famous communication events from the American War of Independence, Civil War, World War I and World War II as examples focusing on the application and characteristics of communication in the American war history and how it has influenced the study of communication in the United States through a brief review of American war communication. The analysis of major events is seen as a useful method for communication studies. Through review and analysis, we can see three main features of American communication about the war: rationalized war, civilian narratives, and political pragmatism. These characteristics have also profoundly influenced the direction of communication studies, with pragmatism, political service and elitism becoming prominent characteristics of American communication studies.

Россия и США на мировой сцене. Часть I. Далекие друзья превращаются в соперников

The period from the American War of Independence (1775-1783) to the sale of Alaska (1867) was the longest period of friendly relations in US-Russian history. This was hardly a period of close ties, however, or what we would now call partnership. Each country was of marginal concern to the other. The gulf in values was profound and unbridgeable, even if the two powers insulated relations from ideological disputes. Geopolitical tension was absent because the two countries largely operated in separate spheres. Where they did interact, friction did not erupt into serious conflict, because Russia was willing to accommodate American expansionism rather risk escalation in regions that were far from vital. The benefits that each country derived from the other were minimal and never arose from extensive collaboration. Rather they were the consequence of each country’s refusal to take sides against the other in conflicts with third powers, including the War for Independence, the Crimean War, and the American Civil War. If relations were friendly, it was because there was no compelling reason to be rivals. The situation changed dramatically in the last decades of the 19th century, as the United States experienced an unprecedented period of rapid growth in wealth and power while Russia entered a prolonged period of imperial crisis. American ideological and geopolitical ambition eventually turned distant friendship into an incipient rivalry.

Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson

Reviewed by: Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson Loren Michael Mortimer (bio) Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution mark r. anderson University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 306 pp. At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, the Continental Army prepared to invade Canada, and the British military government took concurrent measures to defend the province. Patriot and Loyalist leaders alike recognized the strategic importance of the Indigenous confederation known as the Seven Nations of Canada. Composed of eight sovereign Native American towns along the upper St. Lawrence River, these multiethnic communities guarded key river confluences connecting Canada to the rebellious Anglo-American settler colonies to the south. In the military contest for Canada, the Seven Nations could tip the balance of power in favor of the Patriots or the Crown. Likewise, the Seven Nations feared the despoliation of their lands amid the crossfire of a civil [End Page 599] war within the British Empire. As historian Mark R. Anderson shows in Down the Warpath to the Cedars, the Seven Nations proved decisive in the defeat of the Continental Army at the Battle of the Cedars in late May 1776. Although historians on both sides of the US-Canada border have largely overlooked or intentionally disremembered the significance of the Cedars, Anderson offers a timely intervention recovering histories of Indigenous autonomy and racialized violence during the American Revolution, as well as the affair's aftermaths in Native American council houses, Patriot assemblies, and imperial corridors of power. In the summer of 1775, the Seven Nations of Canada had thrived in proximity to European settler population centers along the St. Lawrence River for more than a century. Although the Seven Nations had intimately entangled connections of trade and kinship with the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois, it remained a politically autonomous Indigenous polity. The Seven Nations traced their origins to Catholic converts who relocated to Francophone mission communities during the late seventeenth century. Between 1701 and 1754, these mission towns gradually coalesced into a confederation rooted in shared connections to the St. Lawrence River, Catholicism, extended family networks, and mutual defense. Although steadfast allies to the French before 1759, each constituent community maintained their sovereignty and distinctive cultures. The Seven Nations Council convened at Kahnawake, the largest town with a decidedly Mohawk-Iroquois demographic composition. But this diverse confederation included Hurons from Wendake, the Wabanaki peoples from Odanak and Wolinâk, Mohawks and Nipissings from Kanesatake, Mohawks from Akwesasne, and Oneidas and Onondagas from Oswegatchie. With careful attention to multidimensional Indigenous politics at the confederation, village, and factional levels, Anderson argues that Native Americans created a "strategic environment" at the Battle of the Cedars that aligns with Ojibwe historian Michael Witgen's concept of an "infinity of nations" (1). Indeed, the framework of an "infinity of nations" proves apposite for this study, particularly as political affiliations remained fluid for colonists and Indigenous peoples alike during the early phases of the conflict. Despite the military invasion of their homelands during the American Revolution, the Seven Nations of Canada largely avoided the internecine warfare and dispossession endured by larger and better-known Indigenous polities like the Six Nations Haudenosaunee. Yet the author notes that in "contrast to the reasonably well developed Six Nations Revolutionary War [End Page 600] narrative, the Seven Nations of Canada lack significant historical treatment for the era. The Cedars and its 1775 precedents clearly reveal the complexity of Laurentian Indian politics" (155). While Anderson observed that the Seven Nations "were far from a unified polity" (4), Native American emphasis on local autonomy and factional consensus within councils rendered their confederation no more or less united than the Six Nations or the ad hoc Patriot delegations at the Continental Congress during the summer of 1775. Given Patriot sentiments among Anglo-American colonists in Montreal as well as disaffection with British rule by factions within the Seven Nations, Canada's participation in the rebellion remained an open political question for British officials, Loyalists, Patriots, and Native Americans alike. To make sense of an ethnic and political milieu that defied nationality or a strictly Patriot vs...

Prancūzų slaptoji misija Abiejų Tautų Respublikoje: barono Antoine’o- Charles’io de Vioménilio vaidmuo Baro konfederacijoje 1771–1772 m.

Antoine-Charles du Houx, Baron de Vioménil (1728–1792) was sent by the French Government after Colonel Charles-François Dumouriez (1729–1823) to provide guidance to the leaders of the Bar Confederacy during the years 1771–1772. However, if Colonel Dumouriez is famous because of his activities during the French Revolution, namely for the determinant role he played at the Valmy battle (1792), it is different when it comes to the Baron. Except for some articles in the 19th century biographical encyclopedias and a short biography centered on the role he played during the American Revolutionary war published in 1935, there is no study on him. In spite of this, Baron de Vioménil’s career is a matter of interest, for he participated in the major conflicts the French army took part during the reign of the kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. The baron’s archives, which include abundant correspondence related to his campaigns, are preserved today in the Académie François Bourdon, le Creusot, Burgundy. Being inaccessible for a long time they have not been thoroughly studied, yet. This paper aims at presenting the career of Baron de Viomenil as well as some documents taken from his archives, linked to his participation in the Bar Confederacy operations. Through this endeavour we hope to help cast some new light on a discrete, but efficient French officer who exerted influence on the Polish-Lithuanian history.

The Shandean. Ed. Peter de Voogd. Vol. 30.

<i>The Shandean</i>. Ed. Peter de Voogd. Vol. 30.

John Dillon, All At Sea. Naval Support for the British Army during the American Revolutionary War (Michael Tuttle)

John Dillon, All At Sea. Naval Support for the British Army during the American Revolutionary War (Michael Tuttle)

Soldier and Scholar: Abdias Nascimento and the Origins of Afro-Latin American Studies

Abdias Nascimento shaped Brazil and the lives of Afro-Brazilians as an activist, as a politician, as an internationally recognized scholar, and through the arts as a playwright, a director, a poet, and painter. Through a scholarly career that spanned much of the 20th century and continued into the 21st, his ideas preceded and served as a model for the recent growth of Afro-Latin American studies as a discipline. This article draws on Nascimento’s writing to shed light on the less studied period when he was enrolled in the Brazilian army in São Paulo from 1930 to 1936, as well as the two related periods during which he was incarcerated between 1936 and 1938. This essay argues that—much like Afro-descendant soldiers globally who fought in conflicts from the American Wars of Independence through the World Wars of the 20th century—military service and his subsequent captivity deeply inpacted Abdias Nascimento. His relations with the Brazilian military and its penal institutions guided his concept of race, citizenship, and nation, his activism and scholarship, and subsequently helped mold the contemporary field of Afro-Latin American studies, directly and indirectly.

Poe in Cyberspace: When Pokerishness Went Viral

Poe in Cyberspace: When <i>Pokerishness</i> Went Viral

The heart of the maritime world: London’s ‘mercantile’ coffee houses in the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence, 1756–83

Abstract This article focuses on the role of mercantile coffee houses during the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence. The purpose is to examine mercantile coffee houses as public and private spaces, and to examine why people chose them as spaces in which to conduct business. The article examines how London’s mercantile coffee houses enabled the maritime population to understand, and remain informed about, maritime affairs during both wars. This includes how their presence facilitated the co-ordination of transoceanic trade, how their existence concentrated people in one place, and how they helped facilitate maritime and naval logistics.

El círculo de los Gálvez: Formación, apogeo y ocaso de una elite de poder indiana

El círculo de los Gálvez: Formación, apogeo y ocaso de una elite de poder indiana

Medieval echoes. Reflection on political theories and cultural trends from European Middle Ages during American Wars of Independence and Between the States

This article examines the influence of formulations and lines of European medieval thought and culture during the two main processes of American political history: the American Wars of Independence and Between the States. In these moments of enormous significance, we can perceive a series of formulations alive since Middle Age centuries; principles with a no evident but relevant influence in mentality and perception during the conflicts. These are: federalism, constitutionalism, canon law, the concept of war, the reception of the work of Dante Alighieri and his ‘Divina Commedia’ and the reception of chivalric medieval culture and the Arthurian tradition.

The Wealth of Knowledge: Land-Grab Universities in a British Imperial and Global Context

The Wealth of Knowledge:Land-Grab Universities in a British Imperial and Global Context Caitlin P. A. Harvey (bio) the colonial legacy of the American land-grant university traced by the Land-Grab Universities (LGU) project, of public universities "built not just on Indigenous land, but with Indigenous land," reveals a far-reaching pattern of institutional development that relied on the leasing and selling of enormous tracts of expropriated Indigenous lands to raise universities' endowment capital.1 The mechanism effecting this tremendous land redistribution was the Morrill Act (1862). Yet while it was the largest, the Morrill Act was not the only legislative grant of Indigenous land made to fund higher education in the United States or among settler societies worldwide. Contextualizing the LGU findings within the larger history of land-grant universities in British settlement societies makes clear that the American land-grant phenomenon was just one episode in the expanding territoriality of settler-colonial universities. Particularly in Canada and New Zealand but also in Australia and South Africa, fledgling public universities received substantial blocks of unceded Indigenous territory as financing from their governments. The development of America's educational institutions, therefore, did not unfold in isolation from the trends established in other Anglo-dominant settler societies. When we consider the land-grant university in British imperial and global perspective, the full territoriality of land-grant universities comprises over 15 million acres spread over three continents (table 1). Settlers' provincial and federal governments sponsored land-grant institutions with the aim of applying scientific methods to agriculture, fostering technological innovation, and creating an internationally competitive yet civic-minded workforce.2 In New Zealand (Aotearoa) in 1869, for instance, the Province of Otago's legislators issued deeds of 100,000 acres for the University of Otago, followed by another 100,000 acres on the South Island (Te Waipounamu) in the 1870s.3 The Ngāi Tahu disputed this reallocation. But with the New Zealand Wars ongoing and swayed by the complaints of Otago University's largest land lessee, Robert Campbell, the colonial state evicted the Māori landholders.4 [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Aggregate Totals of University Land by Grant and Location In England, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had long relied on the rental income generated by landholding. Even today, the Oxbridge colleges "are among the largest institutional landowners" in land-scarce England.5 Settler societies carried on this European custom on a larger and more devastating scale. Particularly where capital was lacking from benefactions, fees, or government subsidies, the resort to land-granting was continuous. As early as 1619, the British government assigned 10,000 acres to a "Henrico College" in Virginia. Warfare with the Powhatan Confederacy and chronic underpopulation ensured that this institution was short-lived.6 Reaching forward to the nineteenth century and prior to the Morrill Act, The Constitutional History of New York indicates that in 1846 the U.S. [End Page 98] government released to "Tennessee 1,300,000 acres of public land in that state for the endowment of a college."7 This land, nearly the size of Delaware, lay to the "south and west of the Congressional reservation line." Supposedly "vacant and unappropriated Lands" existed there after the violent removal of the Cherokee.8 In nearly the same moment, one of the earliest educational land grants in British North America went to King's College, a precursor to the University of Toronto, in 1828. An Anglican bishop, John Strachan, secured 225,944 acres of valuable Crown Reserves for the new college.9 It is likely that much of this property once supported the Mississaugas of New Credit (Mississauga Ojibwa). Under the strain of recurring Indigenous-settler skirmishes, the Mississaugas ceded 250,808 acres of their land—covering most of what is now the city of Toronto and region of York—first to the British Crown in 1787 and then to the Upper Canadian government in 1805. The Toronto Purchase, as these agreements became known, followed the influx of Loyalists into Upper Canada after the American Revolutionary War.10 Following Canadian Confederation in 1867, institutions of higher learning repeated Toronto's (and, by then, also...

From Pennsylvania to Transylvania: August Ludwig Schlözer and the decentering of Enlightenment

This article analyzes the historical and political thinking of the eighteenth-century German historian August Ludwig Schlözer, in the context of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The article argues that Schlözer's disillusionment with these transformative events led him to identify the German settlers in medieval Transylvania as agents of a better Enlightenment. In doing so, Schlözer constructed the history of the Transylvanian German colony as an antithesis to American colonial endeavors, while redefining the frameworks and history of enlightened progress in both time and space. In this way, Schlözer translated the history of a marginal East–Central European region into a world-historical narrative.

Artillery Supported by Infantry: The Royal Artillery at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse

This paper analyzes three questions concerning the Royal Artillery at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse: how many artillery pieces were used during the battle, which units were employed, and what role the Royal Artillery played in relationship to its parent organizations, the British Army and the British Board of Ordnance. Each of these topics have been seldom discussed, especially in connection to the narrative of the Battle of Monmouth. It is hoped that these inquiries can provide some clarity on the Royal Artillery’s part in the battle, and might spark new efforts of research by future scholars of the American Revolutionary War. In examining these points, careful attention was made in discussing the overall structure of the Royal Artillery and offering a comparison/contrast with its opponent: the Continental Artillery. The main primary source consulted in this discussion was the official Papers of Brigadier-General James Pattison, commander of Royal Artillery forces in North America. These research endeavors resulted in a concrete number of guns used during the Monmouth campaign, some strong indications for the particular units employed, as well as some new insights concerning the traditional interpretation of the battle that may require future analysis.