Author’s Talk—Freedom Around the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution

Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University discusses her new book that argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. Drawing from the book, Pearsall plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence—security, happiness, respect—and finds its spark in a far-flung place. In an Edinburgh club where women were first invited into philosophical conversations, she explores what the pursuit of happiness meant to women and men of all sorts. She traces how novel forms of slavery provoked a new use of the word liberty in Connecticut petitions as well as in cries of “liberty or death.” On a Kolkata street where Indians protested relentless taxes, Pearsall finds a critique of oppressive imperial government that galvanized Americans in their protests and parties against the tea of the English East India Company. In rural Germany, boy soldiers sent abroad to die for Britain complicate who can lay claim to being civilized in a brutal war. Through the telling of the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty protesting tyranny around the world, this talk restores these individuals and movements to their rightful place in the vital story of the American Revolution and the nation it created.

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