Historical United States flag with thirteen stars representing the original colonies
Dan Thornberg
Envato Elements (License on SonyCI)
Beyond the 13: The American Revolutionary Era Outside the Emerging United States
The 2022 Lowell Lecture Series presented by the Paul Revere Memorial Association aims to direct focus to areas that have not traditionally received as much attention in explorations of the Revolutionary period, a particularly important topic as we are already in 250th anniversary commemorations and reflections.
The series aims to highlights physical spaces like the Caribbean and Eastern Atlantic world and theoretical “outsiders” in diasporic communities or Indigenous Communities on the borderlands of what became the United States.
Join Revolutionary Spaces for the launch of Eli Merritt’s new eye-opening book, _Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution_. Merritt reveals the deep political divisions that almost tore the Union apart during the American Revolution, and how the founding generation succeeded in holding the young nation together by uniting for the sake of liberty and self-preservation.
_Disunion Among Ourselve_s has inevitable resonances with our present era of political hyperpolarization and serves as a touchstone for contemporary politics, reminding us that the founders overcame far tougher times than our own through commitment to ethical constitutional democracy and compromise.
“Eli Merritt deftly explores a revolutionary America rife with divisions and driven by a fear of civil wars on multiple fronts. Deeply researched, wide-ranging, and insightful, Disunion Among Ourselves persuades that our national Union began from, and still depends on, fending off the many demons of disunion.”—Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair at the University of Virginia and author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804
“Disunion Among Ourselves tells an important story that has been missed or skipped over in nearly all histories of the Revolution. It has indeed, as promised, recovered ‘a whole area of the Revolution’ previously underappreciated, and for that is invaluable.”—Richard Kreitner, writer and historian, author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union
“Disunion Among Ourselves is an elegantly written and deeply researched book that challenges long-accepted myths about the origins of the American Union. Merritt shows that the seeds of the Civil War lay in the American Revolution and that the founding fathers had good cause to fear disunion and internecine conflict. The chance to build a new republic might have been fumbled away without superior statecraft––and indeed it nearly was. This suspenseful account supplies a timely lesson for our own hyperpartisan times––that the values of moderation, compromise, and the rule of law are prerequisite to the survival of democracy.”—Ian W. Toll, author of Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy
Doors open at 5:30pm and is free and open to the public thanks to the generous support of The Lowell Institute. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided.
The African Atlantic history of smallpox inoculation is a rich, yet oft-overlooked story. This lecture contextualizes the more familiar history of Onesimus and Cotton Mather in early eighteenth-century Boston within the broader history of Africans performing smallpox inoculations in West Africa, Jamaica, and Saint Domingue (Haiti) in the Revolutionary Era of the late eighteenth century.
Thomas Paine’s call to revolution reverberated throughout the Atlantic world in 1776. Intended to rally more than America’s founding fathers, the entreaty was carried to the Netherlands where Patriot militias rose up in 1787 to reclaim their rights, was echoed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, ignited insurrections against slavery throughout the Caribbean, and emboldened Black Loyalist settlers in Sierra Leone to claim their right to property and self-government.
This lecture will explore how these reverberations of American claims to their revolutionary rights influence our understanding of liberty and equality from the eighteenth century to the present.
Watch live [on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/842536866924047/) or return here for the published archival video.
On July 4, 1779, French forces captured the British Caribbean colony of Grenada. They would occupy that island, as well as the neighboring islands of St. Vincent and Dominica, until the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
This talk explores what the American Revolution meant to British colonial subjects in these lesser-studied parts of the Americas. Indigenous, enslaved, and free people seized the opportunity to ally with Great Britain’s chief rival, France, and many used this moment of disruption to seek freedom, sovereignty, or autonomy.
