The war for American Independence had just barely ended in 1783 before David Ramsay, the son of Irish Protestant farmers and a physician by training, picked up a pen and began writing the first history of the American Revolution. In the over two hundred years since Ramsay’s two volume History of the American Revolution (1789) first appeared in print, the people, places, and ideas that feature in the story of the Revolution have undergone radical changes. This course explores the Revolution from a trans-Atlantic and imperial perspective and introduces students to the different, oftentimes conflicting ways various scholars have written about that consequential event that Ramsay lived through.

At the heart of this event is the vexed relationship between liberty and slavery. White colonists jealously guarded their colonial liberties from what they perceived to be imperial overreach. But even as they signed their names to the Declaration of Independence, there were some who squinted their eyes and called attention to the glaring contradictions inherent in those words. David Cooper, a Quaker farmer from New Jersey, couldn’t quite square the language of Americans who said that “all men are born equal and by the immutable laws of nature are equally entitled to liberty” with the fact that “these very people are holding thousands and tens of thousands of their innocent fellow men in the most debasing and abject slavery.” Cooper’s observation lies at the heart of this course. How was it that a nation founded on the principles of liberty and equality emerged out of an empire that was defined in almost every way by slavery and the slave-trade?

Throughout the semester, this course will analyze the American Revolution through a variety of thematic lenses. Topics will include the tension between colonial rights and imperial authority, the changing nature of British imperial policy, the relationship between political ideas of consent and representation, the political economy of slavery, the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the abolition movement within the British empire, and the role of Britain’s West Indian colonies in the imperial economy and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Since Ramsay’s time, historians have approached the history of the Revolution from a variety of new geographic, temporal, and intellectual vantage points. How has the story of the Revolution changed in light of these different historical methodologies? What do these new stories tell us about Cooper’s observation regarding liberty and slavery?

Using the analytical and methodological tools learned during the semester, students will closely analyze a person, object, or event related to the Revolution for their final research project. Students will be required to use primary source material from Harvard’s numerous archives located across campus as well as the Colonial North America at Harvard Library (CNA) online database, which contains thousands of previously unpublished digitized manuscript and printed documents. Some portion of the final essays will be featured on the CNA website.