This chapter explores how the Patriots deployed law in order to mobilize fellow citizens towards rebellion. In the decade before the Revolution, Patriots fashioned law in innovative ways as a language that could cross geographical and social borders in order to rally citizens to a cause. What made their appeals effective? First, the chapter asks how the settlers’ growing competence in formulating constitutional argument favored the Whigs. Second, a look at early nineteenth-century Spanish American independence movements helps explain how and why the Whigs could plausibly believe one of their core ideas – that a colony was a polity representing the rights of an underlying people. Finally, attention to the vernacular legal culture of the streets and taverns shows how Patriot legal appeals could be appropriated by ordinary people. The remarkable capacity of Whig law to bridge social and geographical distances helped make it a powerful instrument of revolutionary mobilization.

The American Revolution transformed Indigenous American nations. But their history throughout the colonial period was one of great change and rupture well before 1776. Colonization introduced disease, new material goods, economic transformations, and countless new ideas to the Indigenous people of North America over the course of generations. In this context, Indigenous communities changed, adapted, and above all survived through many challenges and opportunities. By the mid eighteenth century, several Indigenous groups were building power and stability in the midst of change, even as others struggled, migrated, and consolidated. In the 1750s, imperial conflicts between France and Great Britain altered the political context in which several groups had built influence and authority. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Eastern Indians faced the British empire without a counterbalancing French colonial government. This severe change constrained Indigenous options and strategy on the eve of Revolution.

This chapter explores the stories of urban and rural protesters, female boycotters and spinners, Black rebels and runaways, and Indigenous combatants who engaged in protests, boycotts, and mob action to assert their political and personal legitimacy on the eve of the American Revolution. The study of material culture demonstrates that the quest for liberty became central to American life through things; objects ranging from the mundane to the elite made the lofty, abstract goals of political protest tangible to men and women throughout the British colonies. Physical artifacts – whether built spaces, printed visuals, homespun fabrics, seized cargo, or tokens of war – illustrated a convergence of material culture and collective action in the 1760s and 1770s. The material culture and performance of protest played an important role in fueling the social and political unrest that pushed the colonies toward revolution.

Historical pragmatics studies the use of language in earlier periods and the developments of usage patterns over time. Recent research in this area has increased our understanding of how usage patterns develop, and we have gained insights into a range of pragmatic phenomena at specific times in the history of English. This chapter provides exploratory accounts for each of the traditional periods in the history of English, from Old English up to Present-day English by focusing on those areas within historical pragmatics that have already received sufficient scholarly attention, in particular the use of pragmatic markers, speech acts and the use of politeness. These overview sketches of the individual periods will be linked through an analysis of specific development patterns.

This chapter provides an overview of the developments in syntax in the history of English. There is a long–term typological drift, with the language moving from synthetic to analytic, with functions that were earlier expressed in the morphology increasingly coming to be expressed by free morphemes. The main word order developments are the loss of Object–Verb orders in Early Middle English, and the loss of V2/V3 word order in the fifteenth century, leading to strict SVO order in which information–structural status was mapped onto syntactic function, with subjects as the only unmarked way to express ‘given’ information and objects as the only unmarked way for ‘new’ information. A number of ‘escape hatches’ develop to compensate for the loss of options for the flow of information in the clause: word order alternations such as the dative alternation or the particle alternation in phrasal verbs, cross-linguistically rare passives, ‘stretched verb’ constructions and clefts.

Pre-Revolution environments set in motion a new, more intensive set of extraction, cultivation, and irrigation practices that undervalued biodiversity and maximized monocultural production. Perhaps most profoundly, consumption patterns violently pushed and pulled the ecological contours of continental borderlands, fraying macroscopic and microscopic historical ecologies. At the same time, environmental “levers” cultivated conditions leading to the American Revolution. This chapter locates these lost symbiotic and regenerative historical ecologies, once again returning them from the historical margins. It seeks to bring into relief a few of these continental ecological “levers” – including the role of commodities, land-use practices, and infrastructure – that fueled and ultimately led to the new world-historical configurations during the global Age of Revolutions.

European colonial ventures in the Americas depended on Native American trading routes and economic practices, even as they transformed them. Europeans initially sought to extract valuable resources, but this endeavor always intersected with the day-to-day business of men and women alternately competing and cooperating to sustain their communities. European traders and settlers thus fit into networks crossing imperial and cultural boundaries that were simultaneously economic, familial, and political. Trading networks soon connected the violence of Indigenous land dispossession for the purposes of food cultivation and the export of staples such as sugar, tobacco, and rice with the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, which transported tens of thousands of captives each year from Africa to the Americas by the end of the seventeenth century. Over time, colonial settlers increasingly struggled against imperial governments for control over land, trade, and profits, with revolutionary political consequences in the eighteenth century.

This chapter provides an overview of sound inventories and analysis of some segmental changes from Old English (OE) to Present-Day English (PDE). The topic selection is based on relevance to the PDE phonological structure and to the way specific processes are elucidated by current models of language change. The empirical data are treated in terms of the changes’ mechanism and causation in relation to phonetic and system-internal triggers, and in the context of language contacts and sociocultural pressures. Updating the results of existing accounts, the chapter includes many familiar processes, highlighting areas that are either missing or under-represented in the canon. The notorious letter-sound discrepancy for vowels in PDE is prioritised, while space limitations require a less nuanced survey and analysis of consonantal and prosodic changes.

This chapter considers the environmental consequences of the United States’ victory in the American Revolution during the approximately three decades following the war. Domestically, US settlers carried the agroeconomy developed during the colonial era into new lands through the violent dispossession of Indigenous nations. This expanded the geographic scope of pre-existing ecological trends such as deforestation, wildlife depletion, and soil exhaustion. Urbanization and industrialization introduced new pollutants into local ecologies while facilitating the spread of epidemic disease. Commercial networks also tied American environments to foreign markets. Market demands for fur and heating oil led to the decimation of marine mammal populations. The final decades of the US transatlantic slave trade provided enslaved labor for the expansion of the ecologically destructive system of plantation capitalism. In the north and northwest, foreign demand for US-grown goods contributed to the simplification of local ecologies through their transformation into cropland and livestock grazing lands.

During the 1790s, the US developed a partisan political culture based upon both old and new rituals. Political culture is the expression of a people’s beliefs and values through the rites and rituals of politics – as practiced both within the doors of government and out in the streets. This partisanship culture was expressed through newspapers, petitions, public meetings, parades, toasts, clothing, and accessories. Through use of the similar rituals and rites, Federalists and Republicans sought to convey different messages to the people. Federalists used these rituals to stress the need for confidence or trust in the new Constitution and government. Republicans emphasized the need for the people to be jealous or protective of their rights won in the Revolution as the best way to protect the Republic. Each party claimed to speak for the people and in the best interest of the nation.

A close study of Benjamin West’s history paintings from the 1770s reveals the artist’s imagination of America and the goals of his patron rooted in the service of a continuing British empire. West’s powerful misrepresentation of the colonial past made this visual paradigm appealing even after the political and cultural rupture of the American Revolution. Paying close attention to the artist’s work and its continuing allure for audiences today reveals how imaginative, and inaccurate, history paintings such as this have come to be embraced as actual history.

As a nation, the United States has historically avoided meaningful introspection in favor of glorious narratives with clear heroes and villains. Perhaps the most instructive example of this selective remembering is the nearly forgotten history of the Gnadenhutten Massacre where members of an American militia slaughtered ninety-six Lenape men, women, and children in present-day Ohio. Americans’ dim memory of this event today is intentional, stemming from two hundred years of purposefully uncritical mythmaking. To fully understand the meaning of the Revolution, we must examine how we have remembered it and for what ends. We must learn about Gnadenhutten and how people have used the memory of this event for political purposes. This chapter examines the contested memory Gnadenhutten from the initial cover-up in 1782 through the modern historical drama that re-enacts the massacre.