Presents a collection of primary source newspaper articles and correspondence reporting the events of the Revolution, containing both American and British eyewitness accounts and commentary and analysis from thirty-seven historians.

Finalist, 2014 AEJMC Tankard Book Award Carol Sue Humphrey’s The American Revolution and the Pressargues that newspapers played an important role during America’s struggle for independence by keeping Americans engaged in the war even when the fighting occurred in distant locales. From the moment that the colonials received word of Britain’s new taxes in 1764 until reports of the peace treaty arrived in 1783, the press constituted the major source of information about events and developments in the conflict with the mother country. Both Benjamin Franklin, one of the Revolution’s greatest leaders, and Ambrose Serle, a Loyalist, described the press as an “engine” that should be used to advance the cause. The efforts of Patriot printers to keep readers informed about the war helped ensure ultimate success by boosting morale and rallying Americans to the cause until victory was achieved. As Humphrey illustrates, Revolutionary-era newspapers provided the political and ideological unity that helped Americans secure their independence and create a new nation.

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.

The story of the American Revolution in rural Pennsylvania.

Building on a quarter century of scholarship following the publication of the groundbreaking Women in the Age of the American Revolution, the engagingly written essays in this volume offer an updated answer to the question, What was life like for women in the era of the American Revolution? The contributors examine how women dealt with years of armed conflict and carried on their daily lives, exploring factors such as age, race, educational background, marital status, social class, and region. For patriot women the Revolution created opportunities—to market goods, find a new social status within the community, or gain power in the family. Those who remained loyal to the Crown, however, often saw their lives diminished—their property confiscated, their businesses failed, or their sense of security shattered. Some essays focus on individuals (Sarah Bache, Phillis Wheatley), while others address the impact of war on social or commercial interactions between men and women. Patriot women in occupied Boston fell in love with and married British soldiers; in Philadelphia women mobilized support for nonimportation; and in several major colonial cities wives took over the family business while their husbands fought. Together, these essays recover what the Revolution meant to and for women.

Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament’s attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy. Factional bickering over policy, violent extralegal regulations, and the dreadful experiences of conducting an imperial war while governing a demographically growing and geographically expanding population all led colonists and imperial officials to consider reforming the colonial governments into more powerful and coercive entities. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher Pearl demonstrates how this history of ineffective colonial governance precipitated a process of state formation that was accelerated by the demands of the Revolutionary War. The powerful state governments that resulted dominated the lives of ordinary people well into the nineteenth century. Conceived in Crisis makes sense of the trajectory from weak colonial to strong revolutionary states, and in so doing explains the limited success of efforts to consolidate state power at the national level during the early Republican period.

The fledgling United States fought a war to achieve independence from Britain, but as John Adams said, the real revolution occurred “in the minds and hearts of the people” before the armed conflict ever began. Putting the practices of communication at the center of this intellectual revolution, Protocols of Liberty shows how American patriots—the Whigs—used new forms of communication to challenge British authority before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. To understand the triumph of the Whigs over the Brit-friendly Tories, William B. Warner argues that it is essential to understand the communication systems that shaped pre-Revolution events in the background. He explains the shift in power by tracing the invention of a new political agency, the Committee of Correspondence; the development of a new genre for political expression, the popular declaration; and the emergence of networks for collective political action, with the Continental Congress at its center. From the establishment of town meetings to the creation of a new postal system and, finally, the Declaration of Independence, Protocols of Liberty reveals that communication innovations contributed decisively to nation-building and continued to be key tools in later American political movements, like abolition and women’s suffrage, to oppose local custom and state law.