Despite its apparent isolation as an older region of the country, the Southeast provided a vital connecting link between the Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years of the antebellum period. From the beginning of the revolutionary war to the eve of the First Seminole War in 1817, hundreds and eventually several thousand Africans and African Americans in Georgia, and to a lesser extent South Carolina, crossed the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast. Even in times of peace, there remained a steady flow of individuals moving south and southwest, reflecting the aspirations of a captive people. A Southern Underground Railroad constitutes a powerful counter-narrative in American history, a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States. It is a potent reminder of the strength of Black resistance in the post-revolutionary South and the ability of this community to influence the balance of power in a contested region. Paul M. Pressly’s research shows that their movement across borders was an integral part of the sustained struggle for dominance in the Southeast not only among the Great Powers but also among the many different racial, ethnic, and religious groups that inhabited the region and contended for control.

This striking reinterpretation of the history of Quebec in the revolutionary era - demonstrated through a micro-historical analysis of 20,000 court records as well as official and unofficial political discourses - shows that a central aim of British Imperial rule was the assimilation and subjugation of the French Canadian majority in the colony.

This edited collection offers a broad reinterpretation of the origins of Canada. Drawing on cutting-edge research in a number of fields, Violence, Order, and Unrest explores the development of British North America from the mid-eighteenth century through the aftermath of Confederation. The chapters cover an ambitious range of topics, from Indigenous culture to municipal politics, public executions to runaway slave advertisements. Cumulatively, this book examines the diversity of Indigenous and colonial experiences across northern North America and provides fresh perspectives on the crucial roles of violence and unrest in attempts to establish British authority in Indigenous territories. In the aftermath of Canada 150, Violence, Order, and Unrest offers a timely contribution to current debates over the nature of Canadian culture and history, demonstrating that we cannot understand Canada today without considering its origins as a colonial project.

“Excellent . . . deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness.”—Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history. The American Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s colonies, fueled by local conditions and resistant to control. Emerging from the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, the revolution pivoted on western expansion as well as seaboard resistance to British taxes. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. The war exploded in set battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and spread through continuing frontier violence. The discord smoldering within the fragile new nation called forth a movement to concentrate power through a Federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of “We the People,” the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But it was Jefferson’s expansive “empire of liberty” that carried the revolution forward, propelling white settlement and slavery west, preparing the ground for a new conflagration.

This fourth volume of the Salmon P. Chase papers covers the last 15 months of his tenure as Treasury secretary and concludes with his nomination as Chief Justice of the United States. Letters that document his increasing alienation from the Lincoln administration are featured.

The period from 1690 to 1763 was a time of intense territorial competition during which Indigenous peoples remained a dominant force. British Nova Scotia and French Acadia were imaginary places that administrators hoped to graft over the ancestral homelands of the Mi’kmaq, Wulstukwiuk, Passamaquoddy, and Abenaki peoples. Homelands and Empires is the inaugural volume in the University of Toronto Press’s Studies in Atlantic Canada History. In this deeply researched and engagingly argued work, Jeffers Lennox reconfigures our general understanding of how Indigenous peoples, imperial forces, and settlers competed for space in northeastern North America before the British conquest in 1763. Lennox’s judicious investigation of official correspondence, treaties, newspapers and magazines, diaries, and maps reveals a locally developed system of accommodation that promoted peaceful interactions but enabled violent reprisals when agreements were broken. This outstanding contribution to scholarship on early North America questions the nature and practice of imperial expansion in the face of Indigenous territorial strength.

The interdisciplinary essays in American Revolutions in the Digital Age explore what digital tools can tell us about the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States and reveal how an understanding of the American past can make sense of our digital present. By employing a host of innovative digital research methods, these authors challenge long-held assumptions about the American past. In addition, this collection uniquely demonstrates how contemporary anxieties about an array of topics, including media disinformation, patriarchy, economic inequality, and public memory, can be better understood through careful considerations of early American history. Open Access edition funded by Iona University

Many Canadians believe their nation fell on the right side of history in harbouring black slaves from the United States. In fact, in the wake of the American Revolution, Loyalist families brought slaves with them to settle in the Maritime colonies of British North America. The transition from slavery in the American colonies to slavery in the Maritimes required slaves to use their traditions of survival, resistance, and kinship networks to negotiate their new reality. While some local judges chipped away at slavery, Maritime slaves fought against the institution of slavery by refusing to work, by running away, by reconstituting their families, and by challenging their owners in court. Harvey Amani Whitfield’s book, the first on slavery in the Maritimes, is a startling corrective to the enduring and triumphant narrative of Canada as a land of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad.

Subjects and Sovereigns reexamines the traditional bond between subject and sovereign and argues that this relationship endured as a powerful site for claims-making in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

In twentieth-century Canada, mainline Protestants, fundamentalists, liberal nationalists, monarchists, conservative Anglophiles, and left-wing intellectuals had one thing in common: they all subscribed to a centuries-old world view that Catholicism was an authoritarian, regressive, untrustworthy, and foreign force that did not fit into a democratic, British nation like Canada. Analyzing the connections between anti-Catholicism and national identity in English Canada, Not Quite Us examines the consistency of anti-Catholic tropes in the public and private discourses of intellectuals, politicians, and clergymen, such as Arthur Lower, Eugene Forsey, Harold Innis, C.E. Silcox, F.R. Scott, George Drew, and Emily Murphy, along with those of private Canadians. Challenging the misconception that an allegedly secular, civic, and more tolerant nationalism that emerged excised its Protestant and British cast, Kevin Anderson determines that this nationalist narrative was itself steeped in an exclusionary Anglo-Protestant understanding of history and values. He shows that over time, as these ideas were dispersed through editorials, cartoons, correspondence, literature, and lectures, they influenced Canadians' intimate perceptions of themselves and their connection to Britain, the ethno-religious composition of the nation, the place of religion in public life, and national unity. Anti-Catholicism helped shape what it means to be "Canadian" in the twentieth century. Not Quite Us documents how equating Protestantism with democracy and individualism permeated ideas of national identity and continues to define Canada into the twenty-first century.