The study of the history of English has its roots in the work of English scholars who first concerned themselves with the nature of their language about four hundred years ago. Prior to the eighteenth century this work was pre-linguistic, positing a divine origin for language and comparing English (unfavourably) to Classical Greek and Latin. With the advent of modern linguistics in Indo-European research, the history of English became an object of academic interest and the first university positions for its study were established, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia. Simultaneously there arose a tradition of studying English dialects, first as an antiquarian occupation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then later as an attempt to capture local history in the vocabulary of specific regions in the twentieth.  This then led to the production of dialect dictionaries and surveys.

After independence, the United States as a new nation can be said to have “re-encountered” the world from 1787 to 1800. The Treaty of Paris (1784) and the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 meant that it navigated a world it once knew as a new political entity. The United States in its early years forged new relationships or attempted to maintain older ones, hoping to potentially “make the world anew,” while also contending with leftover, unfinished colonial-era business. Although the new nation re-encountering the world beyond its borders constituted the first forays by the United States in the process of becoming a nation with global reach and influence, the process was a long, fraught one. This chapter argues that, though far from being the globalizing power it would subsequently become, the United States put out global feelers while also being globalized at home.

This viewpoint examines The Dying Negro, A Poem (London, 1773). The poem was directly inspired by a May 1773 newspaper account of an unnamed enslaved man who had sailed to London with his enslaver, emancipated himself, and was subsequently recaptured; he died by suicide while imprisoned in a ship anchored in the River Thames awaiting transport back to the Americas. Authors John Bicknell and Thomas Day used this tragic event to wage a poetic protest against slavery in the British empire. As the American Revolution neared, the authors revised the poem, including its title, to fortify its antislavery message. Subsequent editions condemned the hypocrisy of American slave-owning Patriots, using their embrace of slavery to assert English moral superiority in the Revolutionary conflict. The Dying Negro was published in multiple editions and sparked popular engagement in debates over slavery and the meaning of freedom in the era of the American Revolution.

This chapter introduces and explores the complex evidence for the Scandinavian influence on English. This influence resulted from the period of intense contact following the settlement of speakers of the early Scandinavian languages (Old Norse) in Viking age Britain, and its effects were extensive and profound, most measurably upon the lexicon. We begin by addressing the considerable difficulty of identifying Scandinavian input at the etymological level. We then highlight the wide range of English sources, medieval and modern, which need to be examined in order to find and analyse lexical material influenced by Norse. We assess the evidence provided by some of these sources for how Norse-derived words were integrated into early English vocabulary, paying attention to dialect distribution and to the semantic and stylistic relationships that these terms established with other members of their semantic fields.

This chapter focuses on the urban engines of the Revolution, America’s cities. Exploring the whole panorama of urban life provides a proper understanding of the role towns played in setting the Revolution in motion. Towns were anchors of an Atlantic world in which, as dynamic and expanding places, they were a source of novelty, tension, and disorder. The question is, therefore, why and how did this dynamic fuel a revolutionary movement in the thirteen colonies of mainland North America but not in the cities of the British Caribbean or indeed Britain itself? To address this conundrum is to understand better the part played by towns in the development of an American Revolution. More specifically, it helps historians grasp the settlements’ importance not only as towns, but as colonial towns.

The Revolutionary War was simultaneously a time of increased emphasis on marriage and family, as well as individual rejection of the marital monopoly on sex. Some individuals broke common sexual mores by engaging in fornication or extramarital affairs. Others sought more freedom, such as when the enslaved ran away from their masters and reconfigured their families on their own terms, or when abused wives fought for more safety. However, race, gender, and wealth all affected the extent to which a person’s sexuality was judged and criminalized. The imperial crisis and Revolutionary War offered opportunities to those who wished to break sexual taboos and a continued sense of the importance of loyalty to marriage and family ideals to others. By the end of the war, the elaboration of new divorce laws in some states and the reduction in criminal trials for fornication created more options for sexual freedoms.

This chapter examines the role religion played in the prosecution of the American Revolution. It explains the way that Revolutionary leaders often utilized religious language in their public appeals, translating justifications for rebellion from terms of Enlightenment reason and international law to religious terms. This chapter also demonstrates how the Continental Congress coopted hundreds of American clergymen as spokesmen for the independence. Finally, it demonstrates how religious beliefs – and religious identities – were affected by the Revolution, including conflicts over liturgy and fractures within religious communities over politicized public rituals such as days of fasting and prayer. Although Protestant Christian denominations were the most numerous in the colonies at the time of the Revolution, this chapter considers the experiences of American Catholics and Jews as well.

The chapter discusses four seasons: winter, the campaigning season of summer and autumn, spring, and the rainy season in Sierra Leone, where formerly enslaved colonists migrated. Weather and climate acted upon soldiers, civilians, Native Americans, and people of African descent, who in turn reacted. In springtime people learned about crop failures the previous autumn, hoarded food and gouged prices, and migrated in search of better options. Summer, autumn, and the rainy season fostered malaria, yellow fever, meat spoilage, cattle deaths, insect pests, and hurricanes. People responded with campaigns of crop destruction and animal theft, and by rioting. Wintertime made apparent scurvy and salt shortages. Soldiers and Native Americans relocated to forts, Indigenous peoples ate more famine foods, and everyone suffered from the sense of isolation that arose from a dearth in news. Throughout the Revolution, people suffered from the smallpox, mutinies, and self-interest that challenged humans’ resilience.

Conventional histories of the revolutionary period tend to largely omit Indian policy and the Gulf Coast region, but both are foundational to the formation of the early republic. The thirteen colonies had been flanked by Indigenous power, which prevented an unfettered American expansionism. The failure of Indian policy under the Articles of Confederation and the question of the “Indian problem” that arose, therefore, framed federalist debates and shaped the development of the federal government. Congress subsequently embraced a militant nationalist politics concerned with Indian affairs. Securing control over the Indian trade and taking possession of the lands then claimed by Spain allowed the United States to expand across the continent. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the size of the nascent nation, and the seizure of Indigenous lands and the removal of Indigenous peoples from the former Spanish borderlands enabled the rise of the Antebellum South.

This chapter studies how land disputes characterized the North American backcountry from the Green Mountains to the Piedmont and west into the territory of the Ohio and Kentucky Rivers. Whatever their specific circumstances, rural rebels throughout the North American colonies shared goals: They wanted secure possession of the land they occupied and improved, and they wanted to rule themselves. These intertwined goals were considered rebellious in the 1750s and 1760s, and became revolutionary in the 1770s when farmers yoked their aims to the growing imperial struggle with Britain. As a result, these uprisings became the kinds of attacks on authority and property that encouraged British officials to intensify their efforts to keep colonial order. Because rebellious farmers wanted secure possession of the land, free access to markets, and to rule themselves, they fought for a brand of independence that contributed to the boiling tensions that inspired colonists to rebel against Britain in the 1770s.

The need to share news and information and circulate ideas about politics, commerce, and other issues, together with an accompanying desire to control how others circulated them, led British officials, American colonists, Native Americans, and people of African descent to develop overlapping and competing pathways of communication. Through formal structures such as the imperial Post Office and military communications, and through informal networks of individual connections, they attempted not only to connect with others but also to shape and control narratives about the world around them, and in particular brewing controversies over continental diplomacy and imperial policies. Their communication took three forms: oral – the spoken word was available to all; written – mostly in the form of manuscript correspondence; and print – which encompassed official announcements, pamphlets, and periodicals such as newspapers. Communication proved vital to all the inhabitants of North America in the 1760s and 1770s.

What did it mean to have a national economy? The American Revolution provided the political space and the ideological impetus for institutional changes that over time fundamentally altered American economies. As policymakers developed ad hoc solutions to individual and governmental debt woes, they prompted resistance and counterresistance, and eventually created a national economy. This chapter begins with the economic possibilities and constraints created by the new Constitution in 1788 and what these meant for slavery, productivity, invention, and the development of capitalism. It explores how the expansion of land, slavery, and goods shaped the development of an integrated national economy, while also creating variation in how and for whom economic opportunities and limitations applied. Finally, because the national economy worked differently depending on where one lived, and whether one was male or female, Black, white, or brown, this chapter uses the lives of several individuals to understand its different aspects.