This chapter demonstrates how the definition of Anglo-Norman has evolved over the last fifty years, and how this has led to a better understanding of the pervasiveness and longevity of the impact of insular French on British culture. It demonstrates the Anglo-Norman Dictionary’s response to this development in its inclusion and treatment of different types of ‘new’ sources, and discusses the problematic nature of some of these. As a digital platform, the Anglo-Norman Dictionary has introduced a range of additional dictionary-wide features and search tools that highlight the growing awareness of the multilingual context of Anglo-Norman lexis. This chapter shows how these tools provide new data for etymological research, while emphasising the implications of how the term Anglo-Norman language should be interpreted.

Arguments for the abolition of the slave trade and enslaved labor emerged in tandem with Revolutionary calls for liberty. Looking at the diverse participation of men and women, Black and white, free and enslaved, Loyalist and Patriot, the chapter examines the practical implementation of abolitionist ideals. State versus federal approaches, gradualism, colonization, immediate emancipation, commercial abstention, slave trade abolition, war, and rebellion are considered in the period up to the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, although with reference to the continuing struggle of Black Americans to keep abolitionism on the political agenda. Revolutionary ideas and approaches were adapted and reused by abolitionists during and after the war. But like the Revolution itself, there was not a consensus among participants about either the best route to the goal, or even always what the goal really was.

This chapter traces the experiences of Sarah Osborne Benjamin, who married a soldier in the Third New York Regiment and traveled with him from West Point to Philadelphia and Yorktown. Although she never learned to write, she left behind a rich oral autobiography: her application for a Revolutionary War pension. In it, she recalls her work as a washerwoman and cook, her relationships with other Continental Army women, and her postwar financial challenges. She offers a nuanced picture of the Continental Army as a place of oppressive surveillance but also complex social networking and protest. By exploring her interpretation of the American Revolution, I argue that, even as Continental Army women confronted bodily scrutiny and restrictive military regulations, they also derived power from their relationships. After the war, they used oral testimony, material culture, and strategic storytelling to exercise a distinctive form of archival agency.

Over the course of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress spent upwards of $170 million (valued in gold) to prosecute the war against Great Britain. Most of the money issued during the 1770s was not minted coin, but rather paper currency – Continental dollars, to be precise – whose value was based upon a future repayment in gold and silver. This chapter examines the longstanding colonial precedents for government-issued paper money, its effectiveness in prosecuting the war, and the reasons for its eventual failure. The turn to private banks in the 1780s to regulate the money supply ended up marking a fundamental transformation in American public finance.

This chapter focuses on an alleged rebellion by enslaved people in Jamaica in 1776. A broader global perspective on the American Revolution, one beyond the thirteen rebelling mainland colonies, underlines how freedom and unfreedom intertwined together in complicated, surprising, and sometimes horrific ways in 1776. The chapter argues that calls for liberty on the mainland tightened the noose of slavery in the Caribbean. In Jamaica, the American Revolution gave even more force to already powerful waves of racist fear and violence, making dismal slavery even grimmer. Enslaver anxieties centered on control of arms and violence against white women. Moreover, what happened in Jamaica affected the course and shape of the American Revolution. The events of 1776 in Jamaica also highlight that the Age of Revolutions was equally an age of racism and retrenchment as it was one of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Understanding the fallout of the American Revolution in Indian country hinges upon Native American leadership during the time. Often working with and against America’s Founding Fathers, tribal leaders entered unprecedented times, seeking to avoid conflict with the United States, their new neighbor, but familiar foe. Still, to underestimate the power and political maneuvering of these chiefs is to vastly misinterpret their role. In this chapter, the actions of two men, Alexander McGillivray of the Creek Nation and Joseph Brant of the Mohawk, personify the strong leadership wrought by Indigenous trailblazers of the time. These men stood up for indigenous rights and used political and military might to forge a new path for Native Americans in the most uncertain time in United States history. And though their plans faltered, their contributions to Indigenous sovereignty shaped American Indian policy, for better and for worse, in perpetuity.

In 1798, the town of Dedham, Massachusetts became divided over the raising of a liberty pole, a political symbol first used by Patriots in the American Revolution, protesting the Sedition Law. Town residents disagreed, as their countrymen did elsewhere, over the legitimacy of popular critique of government now that Americans had transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. The Ames brothers, Fisher and Nathaniel, embodied this conflict. Fisher, a prominent Federalist, argued that to undermine the will of the majority constituted anarchy and treason. But Nathaniel, a Republican, supported the people’s right to criticize their leaders and check government power. The story of the Ames brothers and the Dedham liberty pole provides a microcosm of larger partisan debates happening throughout the United States over liberty poles, the meaning of the Revolution, and the political role of the citizenry in the new nation.

This chapter examines the lives and experiences of my ancestors, William and Benjamin Frank, freeborn men of color who served with the Rhode Island regiments during the Revolutionary War. By examining their actions and decisions, this viewpoint provides a unique perspective as to how two brothers determined their allegiances during the Revolutionary War. The chapter focuses on the Frank family from the 1750s through the 1830s and explains how two separate Frank/Franklin family lines became established in Rhode Island and Nova Scotia.

Privateers plied the waters of the Atlantic world during the American Revolution. In privately owned vessels commissioned by the Continental Congress, these seafarers brought the war to the British in the early years of the war as the Continental Navy struggled to get off the docks. The court case of Cabot v. The Nuestra Senora de Merced sheds light on this oft-overlooked aspect of the American Revolution. While sailing the waters of the Atlantic, the privateer vessel Pilgrim captured the Nuestra Senora de Merced. The privateer sent its capture into port, but these mariners would only receive payment if the Admiralty Court judged the seized ship as a lawful prize and that is where the true struggle began. Privateers were effective combatants during the war, but the means by which they achieved their ends and their public struggles for prizes colored their legacy and left them forgotten and dismissed in the Revolution’s legacy.

After a brief discussion of the nature of names and naming in general, the central sections of this chapter chart the history of given names (personal names), surnames and place-names from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain to the present day. Names formed in English and the naming practices of English society are foregrounded, but attention is necessarily paid to names and practices adopted from speakers of other languages. Matters of significance include the near-total loss of English-language given names, the rise of surnaming as a new practice, and the intimate link between place-naming and changes in land-use practices. English is now a global language, but discussion is mostly confined to naming practices in England.

In popular perceptions, the “Constitutional Convention” usually seems a miraculous achievement and the apex of American civic life. But the work pursued in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 was far more complex and contingent that we usually remember. Delegates arrived in Philadelphia in May to pursue their charge of revising the Articles of Confederation in order to keep the young and troubled republic united. They quickly changed course: Saving the union, they decided, required more sweeping changes than simply revising the existing government. For several months, they discussed, disagreed, compromised, and endured setbacks and disappointments to craft an entirely new, federal design of government. This chapter explores the Philadelphia convention (renamed, after the fact, the Constitutional Convention) to reveal the framers’ wide-ranging debates, including about the nature of representation, the place of racial slavery in the American republic, and state vs. federal powers.