Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution

Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution
Author: Michael Meranze
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-01-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442624388

Between 1750 and 1820, tides of revolution swept the Atlantic world. From the new industrial towns of Great Britain to the plantations of Haiti, they heralded both the rise of democratic nationalism and the subsequent surge of imperial reaction. In Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution, nine essays consider these revolutionary transformations from a variety of literary, visual, and historical perspectives. On topics ranging from painting and poetry to prison reform, the essays challenge and complicate our understandings of revolution and reaction within the transatlantic imagination. Drawing on examples from different local and regional contexts, they demonstrate the many remarkably local ways that revolution and empire were experienced in London, Pennsylvania, Pitcairn Island, and points in between. Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

The New Map of Empire

The New Map of Empire
Author: S. Max Edelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674978994

After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic. Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented. Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.

British America, 1500-1800

British America, 1500-1800
Author: Steven Sarson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780340760093

Strangely, the histories of empires and colonies are usually distinct fields of inquiry. In this comprehensive volume, however, Sarson combines the histories of the First British Empire and its various colonies to create a sweeping introduction to, and interpretation of, the British-American New World.

The British Are Coming

The British Are Coming
Author: Rick Atkinson
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1627790446

Winner of the George Washington Prize Winner of the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History Winner of the Excellence in American History Book Award Winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award From the bestselling author of the Liberation Trilogy comes the extraordinary first volume of his new trilogy about the American Revolution Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn and two other superb books about World War II, has long been admired for his deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative histories. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he recounts the first twenty-one months of America’s violent war for independence. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. It is a gripping saga alive with astonishing characters: Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an uncanny understanding of artillery; Nathanael Greene, the blue-eyed bumpkin who becomes a brilliant battle captain; Benjamin Franklin, the self-made man who proves to be the wiliest of diplomats; George Washington, the commander in chief who learns the difficult art of leadership when the war seems all but lost. The story is also told from the British perspective, making the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels all the more compelling. Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.

Religion and the American Revolution

Religion and the American Revolution
Author: Katherine Carté
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469662655

For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations. Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.

A Merciless Place

A Merciless Place
Author: Emma Christopher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2011-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199782555

"First published in Australia in 2010 by Allen & Unwin"--T.p. verso.

The Creation of the British Atlantic World

The Creation of the British Atlantic World
Author: Elizabeth Mancke
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2005-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801880391

Presenting a discussion of the forces that created the first British Empire, this volume explores differing perspectives on the rise of Britain as a world power between the 16th & 19th centuries.

Geographies of an Imperial Power

Geographies of an Imperial Power
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2018-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253031591

From explorers tracing rivers to navigators hunting for longitude, spatial awareness and the need for empirical understanding were linked to British strategy in the 1700s. This strategy, in turn, aided in the assertion of British power and authority on a global scale. In this sweeping consideration of Britain in the 18th century, Jeremy Black explores the interconnected roles of power and geography in the creation of a global empire. Geography was at the heart of Britain’s expansion into India, its response to uprisings in Scotland and America, and its revolutionary development of railways. Geographical dominance was reinforced as newspapers stoked the fires of xenophobia and defined the limits of cosmopolitan Europe as compared to the "barbarism" beyond. Geography provided a system of analysis and classification which gave Britain political, cultural, and scientific sovereignty. Black considers geographical knowledge not just as a tool for creating a shared cultural identity but also as a key mechanism in the formation of one of the most powerful and far-reaching empires the world has ever known.

The Overseas Trade of British America

The Overseas Trade of British America
Author: Thomas M. Truxes
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300161301

A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy In a single, readily digestible, coherent narrative, historian Thomas M. Truxes presents the three hundred–year history of the overseas trade of British America. Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes shows how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.

Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis

Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis
Author: John T. McGreevy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1324003898

A magisterial history of the centuries-long conflict between “progress” and “tradition” in the world’s largest international institution. The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than over the last two centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution, extending to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and concluding with present-day crises, John T. McGreevy chronicles the dramatic upheavals and internal divisions shaping the most multicultural, multilingual, and global institution in the world. Through powerful individual stories and sweeping birds-eye views, Catholicism provides a mesmerizing assessment of the Church’s complex role in modern history: both shaper and follower of the politics of nation states, both conservator of hierarchies and evangelizer of egalitarianism. McGreevy documents the hopes and ambitions of European missionaries building churches and schools in all corners of the world, African Catholics fighting for political (and religious) independence, Latin American Catholics attracted to a theology of liberation, and Polish and South Korean Catholics demanding democratic governments. He includes a vast cast of riveting characters, known and unknown, including the Mexican revolutionary Fr. Servando Teresa de Mier; Daniel O’Connell, hero of Irish emancipation; Sr. Josephine Bakhita, a formerly enslaved Sudanese nun; Chinese statesman Ma Xiaobang; French philosopher and reformer Jacques Maritain; German Jewish philosopher and convert, Edith Stein; John Paul II, Polish pope and opponent of communism; Gustavo Gutiérrez, Peruvian founder of liberation theology; and French American patron of modern art, Dominique de Menil. Throughout this essential volume, McGreevy details currents of reform within the Church as well as movements protective of traditional customs and beliefs. Conflicts with political leaders and a devotional revival in the nineteenth century, the experiences of decolonization after World War II and the Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century, and the trauma of clerical sexual abuse in the twenty-first all demonstrate how religion shapes our modern world. Finally, McGreevy addresses the challenges faced by Pope Francis as he struggles to unite the over one billion members of the world’s largest religious community.