“Neighbors, Not Villains: Loyalists and the American Revolution as a Civil War,” Liam Riordan, University of Maine

This is an Ohio Seminar in Early American History & Culture event.

Registration

Liam Riordan is the Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at The University of Maine.

Abstract:

This introduction sets the stage for a comparative biography of five ardent opponents of the rebel movement that created the United States. While their strong stance as loyalists unites these individuals, they were otherwise very different from one another in their social positions and geographic locations. They range from a colonial governor in New England and an Anglican minister and poet in New York, to a Mohawk woman in Iroquoia, an enslaved man in North Carolina, and a female enslaver in Georgia. Each is relatively well known (at least to specialists) in their own right, but considering them in relationship to one another yields new insights about a formative era of change. All five left the new nation after the defeat of the British, but the study emphasizes understanding loyalism through its colonial context and wartime violence, fundamental aspects of the American Revolution that have been downplayed, if not ignored, in patriot-centered accounts of the period.