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This thesis focuses on the interpretive possibilities of the tensions between slavery and the American Revolution that are present in cities that faced British occupation. The history of the occupation is an avenue to incorporate the history of black men and women alongside traditional narratives, which can compel visitors to apply lessons of the past to contemporary problems. By focusing on occupation, I propose that we can expand interpretations at historic sites where the history of the American Revolution is already interpreted for the public by centering on the stories of black men and women who had to decide between joining the British and escaping slavery or remaining enslaved. By surveying the current interpretation of the British occupation in the cities that were occupied, the current interpretation of slavery in these cities, and recent literature on best practices for the interpretation of slavery, this study makes a series of recommendations for Philadelphia’s small and large historic sites. By taking on the task of interpreting black lives during the occupation of the British, staff at such sites has the opportunity to expand its work to not only meaningfully expand African American history, but also expand our public understanding of the complicated meaning of liberty during the Revolution. / History

On December 11, 1782 in Wethersfield, Connecticut, a fifty-two year old English immigrant named William Beadle murdered his wife and four children and took his own life. Beadle’s erstwhile friends were aghast. William was no drunk. He was not abusive, foul-tempered, or manifestly unstable. Since arriving in 1772, Beadle had been a respected merchant in Wethersfield good society. Newspapers, pamphlets, and sermons carried the story up and down the coast. Writers quoted from a packet of letters Beadle left at the scene. Those letters disclosed Beadle’s secret allegiance to deism and the fact that the War for Independence had ruined Beadle financially, in his mind because he had acted like a patriot not a profiteer. Authors were especially unnerved with Beadle’s mysterious past. In a widely published pamphlet, Stephen Mix Mitchell, Wethersfield luminary and Beadle’s one-time closest friend, sought answers in Beadle’s youth only to admit that in ten years he had learned almost nothing about the man print dubbed a “monster.” This macabre story of family murder, and the fretful writing that carried the tale up and down the coast, is the heart of my dissertation. A microhistory, the project uses the transatlantic life, death, and print “afterlife” of William Beadle to explore alienation, anonymity, and unease in Britain’s Atlantic empire. The very characteristics that made the Atlantic world a vibrant, dynamic space—migration, commercial expansion, intellectual exchange, and revolutionary politics, to name a few—also made anxiety and failure ubiquitous in that world. Atlantic historians have described a world where white migrants crisscrossed the ocean to improve their lives, merchants created new wealth that eroded the power of landed gentry, and ideas fueled Enlightenment and engendered revolutions. The Atlantic world was indeed such a place. Aside from conquest and slavery, however, Atlantic historians have tended to elide the uglier sides of that early modern Atlantic world. William Beadle crossed the ocean three times and recreated himself in Barbados and New England, but migrations also left him rootless—unknown and perhaps unknowable. Transatlantic commerce brought exotic goods to provincial Connecticut and extended promises of social climbing, but amid imperial turmoil, the same Atlantic economy rapidly left such individuals financially bereft. Innovative ideas like deism crossed oceans in the minds of migrants, but these ideas were not always welcome. Beadle joined the cause of the American Revolution, but amid civil war, it was easy to run afoul of neighboring patriots always on the lookout for Loyalists. Beadle was far from the only person to suffer these anxieties. In the aftermath of the tragedy, commentators strained to make sense of the incident and Beadle’s writings in light of similar Atlantic fears. The story resonated precisely because it raised worries that had long bubbled beneath the surface: the anonymous neighbor from afar, the economic crash out of nowhere, modern ideas that some found exhilarating but others found distressing, and violent conflict between American and English. In his print afterlife, William Beadle became a specter of the Atlantic world. As independence was won, he haunted Americans as well, as commentators worried he was a sign that the American project was doomed to fail. / History

In the aftermath of the American revolution, elites sought to defend their power and status against newly empowered popular governments and egalitarian demands. They developed new discursive and political strategies, transforming pre-revolutionary ideas about authority and legitimacy, moving from traditional forms of hierarchy based on deference and allegiance, towards a structure of power relations based on the inviolability of property and contractual rights. A new American ruling class began to constitute itself through these strategies and ideas during the 1780s, replacing structures of British imperial rule. It did so in response to threats from popular and (white male) egalitarian politics—that is, class struggle and class formation drove each other. Both, in turn, generated identities and ideologies that were central to the development of capitalist ideology in the following century. This thesis gives an account of that process from the perspective of a variety of American elites, focusing on the fragmented and contradictory nature of elite discourse and strategy as well as on the emergence of commonalities and the role of class interests. It deals with the formation and early controversy around the Society of the Cincinnati; with the development and debate over new conceptions of public education; with the elaboration of various legal and discursive mechanisms for the defence of property rights; with the interrelated roles of land claims, banking, corporations, and the rights of contract; and with the elite sense of the dual threat posed both by state legislative democracy (tyranny) and by rural insurrection (anarchy). It also assesses the role of the 1787 constitutional convention within this process, as a radical move that can be seen as both a culmination and a break from prior elite strategy.

This thesis explores the growth of antislavery sentiment in the English-speaking world during the eighteenth century. I examine the institutional processes, transatlantic discourses, and ideological schema with which individuals and groups reformulated their identities as a means of extricating themselves from slavery's various social, economic, and ethical implications. I argue that abolitionism in England is best understood as the cumulative outcome to a series of identity reconstructions, and that a Histoire des Mentalités, as drawn from the Annales School, is an apt methodology for unmasking the structural underpinnings of an antislavery identity.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / This thesis analyzes the evolution of Abigail Adams's republican thought throughout the course of her life. The transition from a traditional wife of a local lawyer to an articulate and well-informed First Lady can be traced along with the increasing personal hardships she faced in light of the events of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. Her unique relationship to men leading the Revolution and her own intellectual curiosity led her to a sophisticated understanding of republicanism and a unique interpretation of women's important contributions to the new nation. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Alan Rogers / Thesis advisor: Brendan McConville / The Massachusetts Constitution is the oldest active constitution in the world — it has been in effect for 228 years. While the state has amended the original document many times since its passage, its essential provisions, which have remained largely unaltered, are undoubtedly the work of a single man — John Adams. John Adams, routinely neglected among scholars, is essential to the development of American political thought. The purpose of this study is to put a magnifying glass on two important aspects of John Adams's life and give them the detailed study that they deserve: his legal career and its impact on the Massachusetts Constitution. The link between his legal career and his political theory is crucial to understanding that document. To write about John Adams's political thought without understanding the two-decade long legal career that drove so much of it leaves one with only a shallow understanding of how that thought developed. It was through the study of numerous legal authors along with his reflection and experiences as an attorney that Adams came to understand how vital the law was for a nation. Indeed, for Adams, law was the basis for good government itself, "to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men." / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: History Honors Program. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

My dissertation examines the role of “the law of nations”—as international law was known in the eighteenth-century—in the diplomacy of the American Revolution. My method is to assess the way in which European and American diplomats used this law in a series of negotiations involving Spain, France, Britain, and the United States in a conflict over the Mississippi River. I argue that European statesmen based their conduct on a set of pragmatic norms, derived from precedent, which were known as the customary law of nations. American revolutionaries were generally naïve in their use of this law, having had no prior experience with international affairs. John Jay—the emissary tasked with defending American interests in the Mississippi—was an exception to this rule. Among Jay’s most notable attributes was the tenacity with which he defended the statehood of the United States, and its corresponding right to the privileges and protections afforded by the law of nations. The issue lay at the heart of the conflict over the Mississippi, and Jay’s conduct, I demonstrate, was decisive to its outcome. In my last two chapters I explore the source of Jay’s perspicacity and suggest that he likely derived his understanding of the law of nations from the treatises of Samuel von Pufendorf—a leading proponent of a theoretical version of the law of nations that was popular in intellectual circles at the time. Pufendorf was an authority in “moral philosophy”, or the scientific study of natural moral law; and he defined states as corporate moral persons, whose rights derived from a universal law of sociability. Jay was educated at King’s College in New York City (1760-1764), and the president of King’s, Samuel Johnson, was one of the preeminent authorities in British North America on Enlightenment-era theories of natural law. Johnson gave Pufendorf a central place in his curriculum, and it was Pufendorf’s theories, I argue, combined with the authority with which Johnson imbued them, that lay behind Jay’s use and conception of the law of nations.

What role did documents play in the governance of the British Empire during an age of unprecedented geopolitical transformation? Paperwork, Governance, and Archive in the British Empire During the Age of Revolutions answers this question by examining the role of paperwork in British imperial governance in the Atlantic World during the eras of the American and French Revolutions. The dissertation argues that paperwork served as the facilitative technology through which administrative interactions between metropolitan officials and their imperial servants were conducted. Through the creation and circulation of particular material forms, late eighteenth century bureaucrats across the different offices involved in imperial administration–including the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, the Secretary of State, and the Customs–articulated and enforced an ‘imperial constitution’ that elevated the power of royal sovereignty in the governance of the British empire. This role of paperwork remained consistent throughout the late eighteenth century despite the pressures of revolution and war that transformed the imperial state in other respects. But at the end of the eighteenth century, imperial administrators developed a new approach to documents that had previously been pronounced only in domestic governance: the transformation of the archive from its role as a container of documents, into an active site of policy-making. Paperwork–meaning any document produced either in response to official demand, or written by bureaucrats in the execution of the processes of administration; and the constellations of practices in which bureaucrats engaged when using them–made Britain’s otherwise ungovernable empire cohere across vast oceanic and territorial expanses. Through the dispatch and circulation of particular forms, the different institutions responsible for exercising authority over imperial possessions in the Atlantic Basin enacted the specific administrative tasks that preserved the political viability of the imperial constitution. Every act of governance involved the seemingly limitless production of paperwork: from collecting taxes (reliant upon keeping account books and receipts) and navigating ships (dependent upon logbooks and geographical atlases), to negotiating treaties (through diplomatic letter writing and drafting) and maintaining order (requiring the composition and circulation of legal codes). The first chapter of the dissertation provides an overview of the structure and growth of imperial bureaucracy and communications in the British empire during the long eighteenth century. The second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters examine how the central institutions involved in governing the British empire in the Atlantic world, including the Board of Trade; the Secretary of State; the Admiralty; and the Customs and Treasury, used documents. While each of these different institutions relied upon different kinds of documents in executing their administrative tasks, in each case the administrative use of paperwork articulated, enforced, and facilitated the relationships of hierarchy and deference between metropolitan and colonial administrators that characterized sovereignty in the British empire. The administrative use of paperwork, these chapters show, centered upon bureaucrats’ use of documents to demonstrate to their superiors that they understood expectations for proper official conduct, and were acting accordingly. This constitutional and facilitative role of documents, the dissertation argues, continued to inhere in administrative culture during the late eighteenth century despite a set of significant political challenges–notably the American and French Revolutions–to British imperial power. Yet, in one key respect, the material practices of imperial bureaucracy changed in this period. Beginning in the 1790s, administrators began to systematically use the vast archives of paperwork accumulating in the offices and repositories of the British state as sources of knowledge and evidence to inform the development of imperial strategy against the French in Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. These practices of archival use revived modes of bureaucratic governance that had been developed centuries earlier, and were characteristics of a distinctively ‘early modern’ style of administration. The dissertation concludes by suggesting the complications that this history of the bureaucratic archive introduces for extant accounts of British ‘modernity.’ For over a century, scholarship has fruitfully attended to the ideological origins, political development, and administrative history of the British empire in the long eighteenth century. But virtually all of this research has looked through paperwork for evidence of other phenomena, rather than attempting to understand the significance that contemporaries ascribed to the material forms they used. By accounting for the role of documents in the history of British imperial governance, the dissertation also models an approach to writing the histories of states and empires that departs from both structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives on governance by attending instead to the specificities of bureaucratic practice.

The work which follows arose from the examination of three fifth grade social studies textbooks widely adopted and accepted in the State of Texas. Within these history textbooks, seven historical events which occurred during the American Revolution were investigated to determine how primary sources are represented in each selected textbook to support a version of the historical event they accompany. The research question guiding this qualitative study was: How do fifth grade social studies textbooks present primary sources in an American Revolution unit of study. To answer this question, I analyzed the three fifth grade social studies textbooks’ American Revolution unit of study. Historical events common to the textbooks and included in the unit of study were Tax Laws, The Boston Massacre, The Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s Ride, Lexington and Concord, The Battle of Bunker Hill, and The Declaration of Independence. Within the textbooks’ American Revolution units of study, the following primary sources were found: quotes, written documents, photographs, cartoons, posters, maps, artifacts, paintings, and sculpture or statuary. The researcher discovered three findings related to the representation of primary sources in the fifth grade social studies textbooks. These include the conundrum of fact, monolithic representation, and verisimilitude. Suggestions for improving school history textbooks and opportunities for future research are included. / text