The British monarchy has withstood numerous crises in its long history, including American independence. Loyal for most of the eighteenth century, many British North American colonists turned against monarchy from 1774 to 1776. The formation of extralegal organizations combined with the diffusion of print media created a Revolutionary infrastructure that advanced the transformation from monarchy to independent nation. Independence spurred not only iconoclasm but also the resurgence of popular Loyalism on both sides of the Atlantic. It inspired enslaved men and women to issue their own embodied declarations of independence by running away as well as other marginalized groups such as women and working-class men to assert their rights. Independence forced Indigenous nations to weigh whether an alliance with European monarchical powers or the new American republic would best secure their interests. By the late 1780s, some elite Americans turned to British and monarchical models to reassert a hierarchical social and political order.

The American Revolution presented an unprecedented opportunity for Black women seeking freedom. The “Book of Negroes” shows that more than 900 Black women escaped the war with their freedom. The largest group of Black Loyalist women once called Virginia home. Yet, the “Book of Negroes” does not show that many Black Virginian women included in the ledger did not board the departing ships with the members of their families they had departed the Old Dominion with years before. After the British defeat, Black loyalists endured a campaign of re-enslavement and terror inflicted by white Loyalists and Patriots alike created by post-Yorktown diplomatic policy. This chapter argues that Black Loyalist women, especially from Virginia, encountered a particular gendered vulnerability to re-enslavement in New York City. This chapter recovers the urgency Black loyalist women pursued their freedom with during the final eighteen months of British occupation of New York City.

The impact of the American Revolution was felt far beyond the shores of the thirteen colonies that declared independence in 1776. Many of the most lasting effects were felt not in Boston or Philadelphia but in London and Paris, Cuzco and Calcutta. It created the conditions for the altered world of the nineteenth century. A war between empires, the Revolution sped the decline of the Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Qing, Mughal, and French empires, and spurred the rise of the empires of Britain, Russia, and America. It set the stage for the Eastern Question, the Irish Question, the Chinese Century of Humiliation, and British dominion in India and Australia. It exacerbated religious and ethnic tensions in Ireland, Crimea, India, and South America and led to a global obsession with order, centralization, and authoritarianism. Taking a transnational approach, this chapter considers the impact of the American Revolution on world empires, global revolutions, and the lives of ordinary people in every corner of the world, demonstrating the complex, contentious, and often tragic consequences of America’s founding.

This chapter addresses the study of the geographical aspects of English linguistic variation in England, from the beginnings to the sixteenth century. The major challenge in the study of early periods of English is the scarcity of sources, which are often not easy to localise. Only in the fifteenth century does the production of administrative materials in English, in a highly variable writing system, allow for a systematic study of geographical variation covering the entire country; for earlier periods materials are much scantier, and many studies have therefore made use of reconstructive methods. This chapter discusses and problematises the different approaches used by earlier scholars; finally, using the newly compiled Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD), it addresses the possibilities of studying early geographical variation directly, with focus on individual items, rather than through the reconstruction of dialect areas or continua.

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

The extent to which religious motivations helped inspire the American Revolution has generated debate among historians. Some perceive the Revolution to be the convergence of the English radical traditions of religious dissent and political protest. In this view, a strong millennialist, anti-Catholic strain in Protestant evangelicalism saw the war of independence as an apocalyptic confrontation with the Antichrist. Other historians regard religion as a secondary factor in the independence movement. Yet consideration of connections between religion and Revolution cannot be limited to spiritual influences on the independence movement. Many enslaved African Americans embraced Protestant Christianity to criticize slavery and claim a right to freedom. Native American revival movements from the Great Lakes to the Deep South fueled resistance to colonial and Revolutionary land grabs. Loyalists asserted the same right to individual conscience as the Revolutionaries. Accordingly, the narrative of religion must include the sacred motives of many more participants, including those opposed to the struggle for independence.

Shifts in the perception of the role of language users in the history of standardisation in the early periods of the language are evident as the scholarly narrative develops across time. This chapter begins with the notions of standardisation in Old English. The main focus is on the Middle English period, and Samuels’s (1989 [1963]: 66) suggestion that the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English could be used to classify the less obviously dialectal forms of language, and thus might offer a way to discover the sources of the emerging standard language in fifteenth century English writing. This chapter notes the long shadow cast by this aperçu. It then examines more recent work spearheaded by Wright (1994, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2013, 2017, 2020), which has re-evaluated the narrative of standardisation in early English, focusing on multilingualism and the rejection of a single ancestor of Standard English.

For civilians who lived through the American Revolution, war, politics, and family life were inextricably linked. As the continent descended into civil war, violence seeped into daily life, with profound implications for the varied inhabitants of colonial North America, including Black, white, and Indigenous families; free and enslaved people; Loyalists and Revolutionaries; men and women. Civilians, even those who sought to avoid the war, inhabited a precarious position, subject to widespread violence, household invasion, and new, occasionally coercive, authorities and conflicting allegiances. These circumstances unsettled the power relations and hierarchies that governed daily life, disrupting political authorities, social interactions, labor arrangements, and economic exchanges. Rippling throughout Revolutionary society, military conflict and political shifts exposed deeply rooted societal fissures, particularly regarding race, class, and gender. Recognizing this, poor white men, white women, the enslaved, and free Black colonists advocated for a more expansive, inclusive definition of liberty – a fight that has persisted beyond the war.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed a sort of revolution due to the massive influx of new words and coinages primarily from classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum) considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, and made necessary the production of dictionaries that explain such ‘hard words’, and often attest them for the first time. A sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of them remained in the language and contributed to shaping the structure vocabulary, thanks also to the role played by monolingual dictionaries. A text-corpus analysis of new coinages derived from ‘hard words‘ dictionaries in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.

This chapter examines how the importance of the American Revolution to national identity has ossified the “Founders” into frozen figures, limiting Americans’ emotional connection to the Revolution and the bounds of conflict over it today. The chapter focuses on the Tea Party movement, the debate over the 1619 Project, the memorialization of Thomas Jefferson, and the Broadway musical Hamilton to illuminate both the persisting idealization of the revolutionaries and the growing challenges to that idealization. As these examples show, it is when race has come to the fore that debates over the Revolution today have become the most heated. But even then the divisions have not been as sharp as those over the Civil War, for none of the contestants in these debates questions the fundamental legitimacy of the Revolution itself in the way that defenders of the Confederacy question the legitimacy of the Union cause.

This chapter presents the Depression of the 1780s as one of, if not the, formative events of the Revolutionary era. The Depression shook Americans’ post-Revolutionary confidence and forced them to make fundamental changes to their economic and political institutions. Contrary to previous interpretations, this chapter argues that the Depression arose from a major contraction of America’s deficient money supply rather than flaws in the real economy. British postwar monetary retrenchment resulted in currency, credit, bills, and notes racing eastward across the Atlantic, leaving American markets devoid of money and halting economic activity. Put simply, the new nation’s financial institutions, if they existed at all, could not defend the American economy against British financial power. The collapsing money supply curtailed transactions, forestalled investment, and produced a deflationary spiral that hit every corner of the American economy. The abatement of British retrenchment and creation of stronger American financial institutions helped ease the crisis, but the Depression revealed the profound vulnerability of the Confederation’s fragmented economic system.

In June of 1776, the Continental Congress voted to declare independence as thirteen United States, seeking not just to transform the governments of those states, but to undertake a transformation of the international system from which it sought recognition and legitimacy. Diplomacy lay at the heart of the American Revolution, to win the war and to position the United States as the hegemonic power in North America. This chapter analyzes how leaders such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson used diplomacy over five decades from the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the Monroe Doctrine (1823) to enact a revolution in international affairs that would result in the distancing of newly independent republics in Western hemisphere from direct involvement in the European state system, the marginalizing of Indigenous nations, and the elevating of the United States to a position of hegemony.

In many ways the American War of Independence failed to revolutionize American performance culture. After the wartime ban on theater, the resurrected theatrical repertoire quickly reverted to British classics, with a sprinkling of German and French dramas thrown in. Musical performances continued to evoke familiar British folk tunes, comic operettas, or tragic operas. Parade and holiday culture drew on longstanding European forms such as charivari or other genres to celebrate the “perpetual fetes” of the wartime and postwar period. What then would prove “revolutionary” about American performance culture after the war? What could the former colonists proclaim as their own unique and substantive contributions to the cultural life of the new nation?

Following one soldier through the American Revolution, this chapter then focuses on the veteran’s experiences after the war. For Cuff Roberts, the Continental Army brought freedom from the bound labor of his youth. The end of the war brought freedom from army service. But what, precisely, would that freedom entail? Would it include the freedom to move house and raise his family where they chose? Different governments, local and national, would answer these questions in different ways. For the African American Roberts, local government officials would often stand in the way of his freedom to move, and even to collect his war pension. But Roberts would assert a right to make a home for his family in the community of his choice.

This chapter examines the profound influence of settler colonialism in mid eighteenth-century North America, a period marked by the American Revolution and the birth of a new nation. Unlike other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism aimed at the deliberate erasure of Indigenous histories and cultures, seeking to establish a permanent non-Indigenous society on Indigenous lands. This process, driven by land hunger, religious fervor, and European imperial competition, has left deep legacies of dispossession, violence, and socioeconomic disparities. The American Revolution is analyzed as a “settler uprising” — a dual resistance against British policies and a pivotal moment in settler colonialism. The role of settler colonialism and its global implications are critical to comprehending the Revolution and its enduring effects.