Rooted in the lives of eleven enslaved individuals – African, African American, and Native American – this essay demonstrates that slavery in the eighteenth-century Americas was characterized by a wide range of laws, economies, cultures, and demographies. Rather than centering the meta-structures of Atlantic slavery, which are well known and often over-emphasized, the chapter focuses on the varied human experiences within colonial systems that sought to dehumanize and control enslaved people. The enslaved lived meaningful lives that were constrained, but never defined, by their legal and social status as slaves. Their biographies offer valuable insights into slavery in the mid eighteenth century.

American Patriots argued the case for Independence in a distinctive emotional idiom that blended classical theories about the links between feeling and freedom, Enlightenment-era philosophies on the moral force of sentiment, and popular understandings of passion as the source of action. Together, they composed a Revolutionary spirit of liberty. Investigating the history of emotion in the Revolution allows historians to connect intellectual history (the study of political ideology) to social and cultural history (the stories of the revolutionary experiences and contributions of ordinary Americans). At the same time, it provides new insights into the vexed interrelationship of liberty and slavery in American history. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans and their descendants. Attention to the issue of Revolutionary “spirit” thus requires acknowledging the deep roots and enduring power of American racism, rather than simply accommodating the comfortable confirmation of the inevitability of slavery’s demise. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from the supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans. Yet a focus on Revolutionary emotion also reveals that even when members of the colonial upper orders tried to restrain the spread of liberty, they could not fully contain or control the spirit of freedom. Subordinated people, including white women, free and enslaved Blacks, and members of Native American nations worked actively to expand universal views of emotion, understanding intimately the links between feeling and freedom. Many Patriots took a more radical stance and argued that all Americans could lay claim to roughly the same set of universal emotions. In this view, natural feelings could bind all Americans together far more closely than cultivated sensibility had ever linked provincial elites with metropolitan aristocrats. Ultimately, novel theories of universal human emotions became both the foundation of Revolutionary organizing efforts and the basis for new theories of natural rights.

It is impossible to understand how American Patriots first mobilized men, women, and children in support of their Revolution and then created a new political culture for their new republic without studying Revolutionary-era material culture. American Patriots made their Revolution through creating and destroying things. As they toppled statues, dumped tea, raised liberty poles, and made homespun clothes and uniforms, Americans also crafted Revolutionary politics and societies. From acts of iconoclasm to the origins of “made in America,” the material culture of the American Revolution allows us to consider how civilians at home, as well as the military, protested imperial politics, fought a civil war, and fashioned new political identities, building a common cause as they created and destroyed material culture.

This chapter argues that slave courts, or courts that exclusively tried the crimes of enslaved people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shaped the rights that white authorities deemed necessary for a fair trial. The very same rights afforded in the 1787 American Constitution were those denied to defendants within slave courts. Slave courts were also fiscal institutions that compensated slaveowners for the execution of any enslaved person in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the courts of Maryland, the chapter assesses the legal justifications for compensation payments for executed slaves, the affording of differential criminal rights for enslavers and enslaved people, and the procedural operations of racialized sentencing mechanisms. Despite the oncoming American Revolution, these courts persisted through to the Civil War, across the American South. Slave courts were fundamental to regulating race and rights in the pre- and post-Revolutionary world and beyond.

Abstract: This chapter explores how enslaved Americans challenged and resisted bondage during the long eighteenth century. Using specialized skills, cross-cultural knowledge, and personal networks that stretched beyond colonial borders, some chose to self-emancipate, fleeing their enslavers and seeking refuge in neighboring colonies or among Indigenous peoples, while others carved out lives marked by the daily struggles of enslavement. The years leading up to the American Revolution saw European colonists engage more broadly with notions of slavery and liberty, and enslaved people took the opportunity to argue for rights more forcefully, to escape, or to actively fight back against their enslavers, whether through open rebellion or by joining the British or American forces.

The questions of how and why words change meaning are integral to any history of English. Semantic change is complex, since it always takes place in a particular social and historical context, and one change in the system may lead to others. Words also have different meanings at different times for different speakers, and the neat descriptions of changes that are often presented in the literature do not always take account of the polysemy that is always involved. After a summary of the evolution of this branch of historical linguistics, this chapter describes different tendencies in semantic change, and the ways in which changes can be motivated, offering a structural classification of such change. It goes on to consider change in each period of the history of English, exploring the meaning of compounds in Old English, the relationship between the meanings of borrowed words and their etymons in Middle and Early Modern English, and the impact of conscious efforts to change the meanings and usage of socially sensitive words in Late Modern English. Each section is informed by detailed discussions of varied semantic histories, drawn from a range of historical and contemporary dictionaries, corpora and text collections.

For the last fifty years, scholars have accepted that the political philosophies associated with the Enlightenment and British country ideology played a central role in provoking the American Revolution. This chapter moves away from this approach to consider the broad spectrum of political thought in colonial America in the decades immediately before independence. The bulk of this thought was neither as secularized, nor as hostile to imperial authority, nor as egalitarian, nor as American as scholars have assumed. This broader perspective makes it evident that the Revolutionary breach did not grow in any meaningful way from the Enlightenment or British country thought. I argue instead that it was political thought normalized within the empire – indeed central to imperial authority’s proper functioning – and familiar to British Americans that served as the primary intellectual basis for resistance to the London authorities as the imperial crisis intensified. Colonists used Protestant political idioms that warned of the continuing dangers of popery and tyranny to indict the imperial ministry’s actions, formed arguments about the nature of the British constitution drawn from mainstream imperial political theory to undermine the London government’s authority, and invoked episodes from Britain’s tortured seventeenth-century history to legitimate their acts of resistance. This appropriation ultimately destroyed the logic of empire in British America. argue in stead that it was the colonists’ understanding of the British constitution, their use of mainstream imperial Protestant political idioms that denounced popery and Catholicism to indict the imperial

This chapter explores the multifaceted challenges facing the new nation during the Confederation period, including the final years of warfare and its consequences, sectional and regional divisions, class tensions, diplomatic squabbles, economic failures, and threats to national sovereignty from enemies both foreign and domestic. Americans grappled with the realities of independence and explored new treaties and reform movements in both state and federal government. Women, people of color, and the working class questioned whether the Revolutionary ideals of life, liberty, and happiness applied to everyone. This chapter concludes with the Constitutional Convention, which signaled the failure of the Articles of Confederation, but the themes of this pivotal decades remain relevant today.

This chapter offers a broad overview of violence during the Revolutionary War. As an eighteenth-century war, it had elements common to all conflicts during this period, such as plunder, rape, and the impressment of supplies. But the Revolution also had several unique features that heightened violence. As a war of independence, it created questions of legitimacy between combatants, because the conflict pitted British regulars, Loyalists, and Revolutionaries against one another. Each side in the war also had many layers of command, including regular soldiers, militia, and Indigenous warriors, making cohesion and restraint more difficult. Lastly, African Americans and Native Americans were central actors in the war, and racial difference loosened limitations on violence. All together, these factors created a volatile situation in which violence thrived. The Revolutionary War was a fundamentally violent event that disrupted lives, the social order, causing pain, suffering, and trauma.

This chapter explores the creation of the 1776 state constitutions and the question of democracy. Although the new state constitutions democratized governance in important ways, on the whole, they closely resembled the colonial governments they replaced. In Pennsylvania, the new constitution was considerably more democratic than the government it replaced. Most of the other new constitutions made only small steps toward democratizing, narrowly expanding the electorate and giving ordinary citizens slightly more influence over politics. Two states, Rhode Island and Connecticut, kept their colonial charters, which dated back to the seventeenth century. The relatively undemocratic nature of new state constitutions raises questions about the traditional framing of the US Constitution as being necessary due to the “excess of democracy” in the states.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the war was a relatively united, patriotic struggle for liberty and freedom, generations of scholars have established that the American Revolution was a destructive and violent civil war – a conflict between former friends and neighbors who inhabited the same colonies and states. Through a survey of the relevant historical literature and an examination of the nature of this civil war in both the east and west of North America and the experiences of its participants, the chapter examines the continental and transatlantic scale and implications of this internecine feud, both for the British empire and for the United States of America. Yet, in discussing the experiences of African Americans and Native Americans, the chapter argues that labeling the Revolution as a civil war is but one part of the story. If the Revolution was a civil war, then the conflict was also an imperial crisis, war of independence, enslaved revolt, war of elimination against Indigenous peoples, counterrevolution, and insurgency. As it has become widely acceptable and fashionable to call the Revolution ‘America’s first civil war,’ vast, connective histories are required to pull these frameworks together into a new narrative that illuminates America’s past, present, and, perhaps, its possible futures.

This chapter highlights those displaced by the American War for Independence. In the first part this chapter explores the conceptualization of the refugee in the American context and terminology as well as the war’s varied character, notions of charity, the complexity of sickness and the differing refugee experiences of White, Black, and Native American, Patriot, Loyalist, or neither. I underscore the complexity of the refugee experience and its contrary character. In the second part this chapter highlights the refugee diaspora in a global context to form a global picture. From North America out into the rapidly expanding British empire, I explore where refugees went and what became of them. I investigate the complex ways these migrants shaped the places they traveled to and what the long-lasting effects of these journeys were. In so doing this chapter underscores the wider connections and global repercussions engendered by the refugee element in this influential war.

In considering the cacophony of calls to action and the responses or lack thereof to these efforts, this chapter provides a comprehensive view of the varied tools of mobilization that attempted to entice men and women to serve or support military service and the Revolution by engaging in a conflict that entangled individuals throughout the Atlantic world. In a war that involved the military mobilization of more than 175,000 individuals within the colonies and about 300,000 British and Irish subjects alongside 30,000 Hessians, studying the process behind these figures highlights an opportunity to better understand not only the mechanics of the war but the meaning given to the Revolution by individuals who chose at various moments during the eight years of war to heed the call to action in many forms.

Enshrined in the First Amendment and touted as a defining feature of the new nation, the “free press” has long been understood as a cornerstone of American democracy, and yet, our current moment of historical reckoning encourages us to interrogate this founding principle. This chapter considers what the “unfree” press in the age of Revolution looked like through a close reading of the words and the physical form of the New Hampshire Gazette, revealing how eighteenth-century market forces shaped the medium itself, and how these forces, in the form of the exploitation and promotion of coerced labor, demand a reconsideration of the ideological terms associated with the medium. Market forces have also dictated the remediation of early American newspapers and who has access to them today. The chapter concludes with a look at the afterlives of eighteenth-century newspapers, as they have been collected, preserved, cataloged, filmed, and digitized over the past 250 years.

There was no inevitability about the tumults between Britain and the thirteen colonies that eventually led to the American Revolution. North American colonists had little intention of escaping the British empire – they loved it so much that they were willing in 1756 to fight for its survival. They had little interest in their disparate colonies joining together into a larger federation. White Americans and West Indians – though not the large and growing enslaved population of British America – were happy with the status quo and were proud of their many achievements as settlers in a new world, especially in the dynamic period of the first half of the eighteenth century. They were a happy, contented and prosperous people, as numerous writings of the time insisted. Secure in their loyalty to the British monarch, to British laws, and to the majesty of a growing British Atlantic empire, Revolution was not in contemplation.

This chapter grapples with the meaning of the American Revolution by tracing the tangled lives of an unfree Black family, their Pennsylvania and Mississippi enslavers, and several of their neighbors forward into the early republic. It situates gradual abolition in the context of an expanding United States empire and enquires into the limitations of Northern freedom and Southern slavery as stable analytical categories. The experiences of the Wood, Gustine, Duncan, and other families reveal how independence was not an event, but rather an ongoing negotiation. Promises of liberation made in one jurisdiction did not guarantee their enforcement in another. Ultimately, it was Black Americans who transformed the American Revolution into a national freedom struggle.

The background to English lies in the forms of Germanic taken from the North Sea rim to the island of Britain in the fifth century. In this introduction the chapters of this volume dealing with the roots of this input, both in earlier Germanic and in more distant Indo-European are discussed. Contact with Latin, Celtic, Scandinavian and northern medieval French in the several centuries after settlement in England by the Germanic tribes is a major focus among the chapters of the present volume as is the nature of the contact situation, which is regarded as responsible for the transfer effects which can be observed. The typological reorientation which English experienced is a further focus in the volume as is the later development of the history of English as a subject of academic research. In addition, there are several ‘long view’ chapters which present overviews of linguistic areas and levels for the entire history of English.

The Celtic hypothesis is a cover term used to refer to a number of structural features of Old English (and later stages of English) which might have their origin in language contact and shift between the BrythonicBrittonic-speaking Celtic population and the Germanic invaders in the early Old English period. Among such features are the internal possessor construction, the isomorphy of intensifiers and reflexives, two forms of the verb be, the progressive and periphrastic do. This chapter reviews the literature on this area and considers the case to be made for contact and transfer during language shift but accords equal weight to internal factors in an attempt to reach a balanced appraisal of the Celtic hypothesis.