A central concern in the field of women's history has been what effect, if any, did the American Revolution have on the lives of women. One way to further our knowledge of women in the eighteenth century is to study individual women. Elizabeth Drinker is an ideal individual to study in this regard because of the diary she wrote from 1758-1807. The first chapter concentrates on the entries she wrote before the American Revolution, the second, on the years during the war, and the third, on the years immediately following the war. Chapter one portrays a wealthy Quaker women leading a privileged life whose main concern was the health and happiness of her family. She has little contact with matters outside of her immediate concern. The second chapter finds Elizabeth surrounded by tumult that the American Revolution brought to her home in Philadelphia. She did her best to be as little affected by the war as possible, but was forced to act as head of her household after her husband, Henry, was imprisoned by the American government. She became a political being when she lobbied Congress for her husband's release. The third chapter finds Henry safely home and Elizabeth happily returned to her former position as homemaker. The American Revolution had no lasting effect on Elizabeth's life because of her status as a Quaker. She already had the education and high status that Quaker women enjoyed, and which most other women had to wait until after the war to receive. / Master of Arts

Thesis advisor: Alan Rogers / Abstract: Splintered Loyalties: The Revolutionary War in Essex County, New Jersey By Gregory Francis Walsh Dissertation Director: Professor Alan Rogers "Splintered Loyalties" is a study of the people of Essex County, New Jersey and their experiences during the American Revolution. It is a careful analysis of their struggle to understand sweeping political change and their efforts to act in their community's best interest. This dissertation explores the momentous impact the Continental Congress's decision to declare independence had on Essex residents and stresses that both the British and American governments continued to fight for the hearts and minds of the people of Essex well after 1776. Relying on Essex County's military, economic, and judicial records and the public and private writings of ordinary people and their leaders, this project illustrates the waxing and waning of popular support for America's war effort between 1775 and 1783. Popular memory of the Revolution often divides the wartime population into distinct Patriot and Loyalist camps. This dissertation,however, argues that such a dichotomy recognizes neither the complexity of Patriots' and Loyalists' relationships with their wartime enemies nor the varying levels of commitment that Essex Patriots demonstrated in the war to establish a new republic. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

This paper explores portrayals of Catherinian Russia in British and American periodicals during her reign, between 1762 and 1796. Catherine II had an incredibly eventful reign as she enacted important domestic reforms, engaged in two major wars with the Ottoman Empire, executed three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and created the League of Armed Neutrality, among other accomplishments. Britain and America equally experienced momentous change during this period, most notably with the American War for Independence. This paper examines how British and American periodicals reacted to the significant events of Catherine's reign using published materials such as news reports, opinion essays, book reviews, poems, Parliament proceedings, and letters to the editor. This paper first discusses the image of Catherine II as a monarch and a woman in British newspapers. I analyze the transformation in the British perspective from a favorable view of the empress to a condemnatory one beginning in 1780 and juxtapose it to Catherine's portrayal in American periodicals in which the empress suffered from a negative reputation for a majority of her reign. I then shift focus from Catherine as an individual to Russia as a whole. I explore the derogatory views of the Russian nation and people largely expressed in British and American newspapers and identify how this prejudice, in turn, affected the image of Catherine II. The major themes of this analysis are foreign policy between Russia, Britain, and America, during Catherine's reign in the 18th century, gender constructs, and ethnocentrism.

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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.