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.

"Corresponding Republics" is a study of how letter writing practices shaped elite political organizing during the early years of the American, Dutch and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The heart of the project is a study of revolutionary leaders' correspondence and epistolary practices. Letters were the lifeblood of all early modern politics--the means to share information, develop strategies and resolve internecine disputes. This was particularly true of the eighteenth-century Atlantic patriot parties, which all faced the challenge of building cohesive movements in the fragmented political landscape of the old regime. Yet even though most studies of revolutionary politics make heavy use of private correspondence, nobody had yet examined the ways in which patriots' reliance on private letters and networks shaped the revolutions' broader political cultures. "Corresponding Republics" argues that the distinctive old regime private correspondence practices of patriots in each region persisted into the revolutionary period. These practices, which played a crucial role in patriots' political self-fashioning, helped produce different kinds of political networks and cultures of patriot organizing. Though by no means the whole explanation for the three revolutions' different courses, epistolary practices are an essential and untold part of that story. The main sources for the project are manuscript letters in American and European archives. The first three chapters of the dissertation examine inter-colonial organizing during the first years of the American Revolution. Chapters One and Two offer a revised view of the efforts by Sons of Liberty, as the patriot leaders called themselves, to build a cohesive inter-colonial patriot party from 1765 to 1772. They document patriots' deep immersion in mercantile correspondence and their persistence in using it after 1765. Yet this style, which raised high barriers to posing questions or engaging in debate, made it difficult for patriot leaders to have tactical discussions and coordinate their activities across the colonies. The Sons instead created a largely symbolic agreement on general principles of resistance. Chapter Three focuses on the developing relationship after 1772 between the patriots' private networks and public committees of correspondence. It shows how private letter writing helped the Sons organize formal inter-colonial corresponding committees in 1773, which reflected the private networks' focus on information transmission rather than discussion. Not until the meeting of the First Continental Congress in 1774 did patriot leaders develop an inter-colonial network whose affective depth enabled tactical and ideological debate. And even then, the patriots' epistolary tools still encouraged them to paper over serious differences about political strategy and ideology in order to maintain the unity of the colonies. The second half of the dissertation uses studies of national organizing in the Dutch and French Revolutions to examine what was distinctive about the Sons of Liberty's organizing efforts. The underlying problems the patriot movements confronted, I argue, were similar: like their American counterparts, Dutch and French patriots sought to build a cohesive political movement on a national scale through correspondence. In practice, however, the process differed significantly. French Jacobin leaders drew on a pre-revolutionary tradition of scholarly epistolarity, which encouraged discussion and dialogue among participants. These qualities helped them develop epistolary communities far more tightly knit than those of their American counterparts. This proved to be both an asset and a liability. It helped them forge a high degree of ideological and tactical unity within the movement. But it also made it more difficult for them to avoid internal disagreements, contributing to the serious internal dissention in 1792 that foreshadowed the eruption of violence among patriot leaders. The Dutch patriot elites, for their part, created highly hierarchical private and public networks. The division between the two types of networks, heightened by their reliance on courtly epistolary habits, inhibited their efforts to forge alliances with the growing popular militia movement. These divisions were a factor in the Dutch patriots' failure, in the short term, to successfully achieve their goal of seizing and holding national political power.

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.

This thesis uses a case study approach to examine loyalism during the American Revolution, by considering the Loyalists of Newburgh, New York. I examine the Loyalist community by exploring its origins before the Revolution, analyzing its composition, examining the Loyalists' wartime experiences, and by considering their post-war exile. Studying Newburgh's Loyalists allows for a nuanced understanding of loyalism both in the Hudson Valley and more generally. I argue that migration, religion, wealth, and geographic location shaped Loyalist communities and their experiences. My thesis is divided into four chapters, the first of which considers the origins of the Loyalist community, which dates to religious conflict in the town during the 1750s and 1760s. Anglicans fought with dissenting Protestants over control of the church glebe, creating a division which split the community along religious lines when the American Revolutionary War began. Anglicans often became Loyalists, while the Presbyterian-led dissenters were almost entirely Patriots. In the second chapter, I examine the size and composition of the Loyalists from Newburgh. The Loyalist population of Newburgh was smaller than average in New York, but was much larger than any Loyalist community in its area. Men loyal to the King were generally Anglican, poorer than their Revolutionary counterparts, and were often related to one another. My third chapter explores the war experiences of the Loyalists, both in Newburgh and behind British lines. In Newburgh, men loyal to the King faced increasing persecution as war progressed, which intensified when there was a military threat from British forces. Persecution peaked in 1777, when the Hudson Valley faced British invasion from New York City to its south as well as from Canada in the north. Patriots in Newburgh were vigilant in rooting out Loyalist dissidents as Newburgh's sizeable Loyalist population was a military liability in case of attack. As a result of their maltreatment, many Loyalists fled to British-occupied New York City. They often joined Loyalist provincial units where they were frequently used as guides and recruiters in the countryside because they had knowledge of the area. My final chapter considers the post-war exile of Newburgh's Loyalists in Canada. Most settled in what became New Brunswick where they tried to recreate aspects of their old society by settling near former neighbors, and continuing to adhere to the Anglican Church. Many of the Loyalists, who had been poor in Newburgh, improved their social status and gained wealth in their new society. This thesis fills a historiographical gap on the subject of loyalism in the Hudson Valley, and also demonstrates the influence of migration, religion, wealth, and geographic location on Loyalist communities and the experiences of individual Loyalists.

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

Whether through legal assault, private manumissions or slave revolt, the institution of slavery weathered sustained and substantial blows throughout the era spanning the American Revolution and Constitutional Era. The tumult of the rebellion against the British, the inspiration of Enlightenment ideals and the evolution of the American economy combined to weaken slavery as the delegates converged on Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Even in the South, it was not hard to find prominent individuals working, speaking or writing against slavery. During the Convention, however, Northern delegates capitulated to staunch Southern advocates of slavery not because of philosophical misgivings but because of economic considerations. Delegates from North and South looked with anticipation toward the nation’s expansion into the Southwest, confident it would occasion a slavery-based economic boom. Consequently, the institution of slavery was given room to thrive in ways that would take decades and a devastating war to overcome.

The New England Planters were the largest wave of Protestant migration into Nova Scotia prior to the American Revolution. Sponsored by the British government, they represent an attempt to make Nova Scotia a securely British colony in the wake of the Seven Years’ War and the Acadian deportation. Examining the experiences of several families, this thesis argues that the Planters, despite taking up lands in Nova Scotia, remained unsettled. The migration was staggered over a number of years, and Planters maintained close ties with New England. However, the Planters were unable to recreate New England culture completely. Increasing numbers of settlers from the British Isles and revolutionary suspicion marked out Planter Nova Scotia as a separate space, despite the close ties that individual Planters maintained with their homelands. The Revolution forced Planters to choose, but until then many existed between the worlds of Nova Scotia and New England.

The aim for this study is to discern what Swedish history teachers and a few select text books view on history is and how they work around the planning and teaching surrounding political revolutions. The revolutions that have been studied for this thesis is the American, French and Russian revolutions, which have been picked for their magnitude and significance for Europe and the outside world in their respective time frame. The method chosen for the thesis is a qualitative content analysis, which has been applied onto both interviews that were held with four teachers of history, as well as onto an analysis of three different Swedish school books. The chosen theoretical framework was incorporated into the content analysis and is focused on views of history dependent on different historical perspectives on what has driven history forward. These views consist of: ideological/operator-driven, historical materialism, gender-based, ‘from-below’, ‘from-above’ and structural perspectives. The interviewed teachers claimed to operate after many different historical perspectives, and that their educational methods were mainly concerned with teaching the students to consider what their own perspectives were. The text books showed that they, at most times, operated after an ideological/operator-driven perspective with elements of historical materialism and structural perspectives. Both the teachers and text books spent the most time on the French revolution and the least amount of time on the Russian revolution.