About this Event
This talk will address the larger Atlantic World context of the explosive political crisis in parts of British North America in the year 1774 in the wake of resistance to the Tea Act. Questions about the future of independent Indigenous peoples, African Atlantic enslavement, and the very constitution of government itself all threatened to engulf New Hampshire in civil war and revolution. In March of 1774, the town of Hinsdale declared in its meeting that “patriotic speeches and pompous declamations” by self-interested demagogues threatened good order and “true personal liberty.” Yet, by December 1774, elements of New Hampshire militias stormed the British post of Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth and took down the Union Jack. A broader global context drove many people at the local level to develop new revolutionary bodies that eventually overturned the existing Royal government of provincial New Hampshire. 1774 was a critical year for this transition.
Gregory Knouff received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in early American history. He is Professor of History at Keene State College where he teaches courses in the Atlantic World, the American Revolution, Native North American History, the African Atlantic, and other courses on North America, 1500-1800. He is the author of The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity, “’That Abundant Infamous Roach’: Breed and Ruth Batcheller, Moderate Loyalism, Language, and Domestic Power in Revolutionary New Hampshire,” in Rebecca Brannon, ed., The Consequences of Loyalism, “Seductive Sedition: New Hampshire Loyalists’ Experiences and Memories of the American Revolutionary Wars” in Karen Hagemann, ed., War, Demobilization, and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Age of Transatlantic Revolutions, and “White Men in Arms: Concepts of Citizenship and Masculinity in Revolutionary America,” in Anna Clark, ed., Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture, among other publications.
Program will also be presented via zoom - visit www.hsccnh.org to register
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Historical Society of Cheshire County, 246 Main Street, Keene, United States
USD 0.00
