Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-248). Also available via the Internet.

Zugl.: Tübingen, Univ., Diss., 2005.

Bachelor-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2004.

Th.--Sci. écon.--Paris 1, 1977.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / This study describes and interprets the American Revolution in the region of eastern Sagadhoc, now eastern Maine. Attention is concentrated on the sequence of events in this area and their relationship with activities in the remainder of New England and in contiguous Nova Scotia all within the wider setting of the American Revolution. How, and why the insurgents of this section entered and maintained a struggle that continued years beyond their first expectation is the story that unfolds. A wilderness region of large lakes and swift rivers, Sagadhoc's rock-bound coast was remote; in 1775 none of the scattered settlements from the Penobscot River to the St. Croix had been in existence fifteen years. Legally its settlers, approximately four thousand in number, were squatters, some possessing conditional township grants from the Massachusetts General Court, but none with titles finally confirmed by the Crown. Disdaining the security of life in more populated sections, these newcomers were ambitious individuals, some with sound reputations and others ranging downward in type to debtors and criminals. These pioneers disliked restraint: regulation by the Crown or Massachusetts Bay and even rule at home, was abhorrent to each individual so far as it inhibited his own interests. The region's growing emphasis upon lumbering and fishing ties their lot to the prosperity of the exchange economy of the colonies. Their adverse trading position with respect to Massachusetts Bay caused hardship and discontent. Anti-British sentiment found receptive ground here, and the poineers therewith transferred their dissatisfaction to the greatest distant power they knew - the Crown [TRUNCATED]

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Through a close reading of Bristol newspapers this thesis considers the intrusion of revolutionary idioms into the English language. This was a far more hesitant and nuanced process than the 'logocide' argued for by Burke whose notion of a 'linguistic terror' is overly dramatic. In adopting a longer term perspective and considering the revolutionary examples of 1830 and 1848, the violence of Burke's model is replaced by a more nuanced understanding of the range of idiomatic choices presented to British politics by the French experience. A brief introductory section addresses key historiographical and methodological issues. Chapter one explores the development of revolutionary reporting in the Bristol newspapers between 1792 and 1848. The first half of the chapter examines the subtle combination of idioms and rhetorical devices evident in the five Bristol titles for 1792. Reports on French and British affairs operated within a consciously circular discourse founded on the interchangeability of 'signified' and 'referent'. In this way the revolutionary example was fictionalised, demonised and emptied of any political value. The second half of the chapter then focuses on the decline of this discursive loyalism over the period to 1848. Later chapters concentrate upon the trajectory of specific terms into British political discourse. Chapter two addresses two inter-related questions. Firstly, how did the polarised discursive structure identified in chapter one incorporate examples of British interaction with, and sympathy for, revolutionary France? Secondly, how did the revolutionary notion of fraternite interact with, and influence, existing British idioms of inclusion and exclusion? Chapter three explores the revolutionary signifier, egalite, and the associated concepts of democracy, meritocracy, socialism and communism. Finally, chapter four examines the interplay of an egalitarian, revolutionary liberte with older British conceptions of liberty, liberties, privilege, property, and patriarchy. In examining the interplay of liberte and egalite with analogous British terms both chapters suggest that by 1848 British political discourse owed more to the French paradigm than the editors of the Bristol press cared to admit

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The four decades that span the collapse of British imperial authority in the American colonies in 1774, to the disintegration of the Napoleonic Empire in 1815 witnessed unfathomable social and political change. There emerged a transformation from one ‘type’ of time to another: a change in the nature of change itself. Following the onset of the American and French Revolutions, time became more than a constitutive element in the lived experience of history – it also became the chief assassin of political legitimacy. Widespread considerations and perceptions of time in both American and French revolutionary contexts complicated and deranged the efficacy of power. Drawing upon contemporary temporal theories to explain how legitimate political authority eroded (before revolution), remained unstable (during revolution), and was finally reassembled (after revolution), this thesis presents two empirical case-studies for assessing the validity of German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis, and other’s, regarding temporality and historicity. Although Koselleck’s viewpoint is largely dependent upon anecdote and abstraction to support theoretical observations, this thesis explores the application of time conceptions to five sites of political contestation: (1) the peculiar historicity of the ancien regime, which contributed to its own collapse by producing a time temperament that desensitised it to political urgency; (2) deliberative processes of the early Revolutions and the way in which time was transformed from an absolute or constant conceptual presence into an historical actor in its own right; (3) experimentations with time and history that were both a response to, and an attempt to rectify, the instability of political power during the mid-1780s in America and the early-1790s in France; (4) manipulations of revolutionary historical experience as a strategy for justifying the quasi-legal enterprises of the Constitutional Convention, 1787, and the coup of Brumaire, 1799; and (5) a comparative analysis of the interaction between power politics and temporality under the administration of George Washington and the Napoleonic Empire.