00:01 - Good morning.

00:04 - I'm doctor Paul Douglas Newman.

00:05 - I teach at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, and very happy to be here

00:09 - for Pennsylvania's Revolutionary War politics, loyalist and military history.

00:15 - This panel is one of five panels at the conference this weekend.

00:20 - That are all based on getting scholars together to talk about,

00:25 - and then write about the history

00:28 - of writing about Pennsylvania's history in the, in the American Revolution.

00:32 - That's where, coming up on the 250th anniversary next year.

00:36 - All of the scholars that are a part of this project are going to be writing

00:39 - essays for a special issue of Pennsylvania history that will come out next summer,

00:44 - in July for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

00:49 - So, I'll be introducing the scholars that are on this panel in just a second.

00:53 - But just to let you know, the other panels that are coming will be Pennsylvania's

00:57 - revolutionary identities at 1045 the next session.

01:01 - Camille.

01:01 - Casa Boesky from Seton Hill University, John McCurdy of Eastern Michigan.

01:05 - University, and David Curtis of Belmont University will be presenting there

01:10 - at 145 Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Frontiers.

01:14 - We'll see Tim Shannon from Gettysburg College, Sarah O'Donovan from William

01:18 - and Mary College of William and Mary, and Jonathan Burns from junior College.

01:23 - At 415 this afternoon, Pennsylvania's Revolutionary People's Own Ireland

01:27 - from Suny Brockport owning owns not going to be able to be here today,

01:31 - but his paper will be presented Beth Tolmach from Monroe County.

01:34 - Community College and Michael McCoy from Suny orange.

01:38 - And then tomorrow morning.

01:40 - Last but not least, excuse me, Pennsylvania's revolutionary

01:44 - public memory.

01:45 - Adam Bence, who is our gracious host

01:48 - for this, conference here is Adam in the room right now.

01:51 - I guess he I thought I saw him.

01:53 - But Adam from the York County, historical center, Michael Burke

01:57 - from the Fort Pitt Museum and Christian Cassidy from American America.

02:02 - Two £0.50 so,

02:05 - please, try to make it to some of these other panels.

02:09 - Because what we're hoping is from this panel today

02:12 - and from the other four panels

02:13 - is that there will be good discussion from the audience to help these scholars

02:17 - hone their pieces and get ready to do the work in the next three months

02:21 - of working these into article length essays that we're going to be publishing.

02:24 - So, so today, Pennsylvania's Revolutionary.

02:28 - War politics, loyalist, and military history.

02:32 - I'm always

02:35 - so happy to return to the, and it's an organization

02:39 - where I've made a lot of old friends, and a lot of friends recently,

02:45 - and I'm making new acquaintances and new friends all the time.

02:48 - And, and that's the great thing about the is, is that it

02:52 - creates such a great community of friends, but also colleagues.

02:57 - And so first I'm going to introduce I'm

02:58 - going to introduce all three and then they'll go one at a time.

03:01 - Wayne Bodo sitting at the end of the table.

03:04 - Wayne is an old friend.

03:07 - I first met Wayne at the what was called the Philadelphia Center,

03:11 - the McNeil center for Early American Studies, 30 years ago,

03:15 - and then started running into him at over and over again.

03:21 - And then he was close by enough at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

03:24 - He began to come down, and we began to work together.

03:27 - He made presentations of my classes.

03:29 - And so, it's great to see Wayne back here at the again.

03:33 - Wayne is professor emeritus of history, from IUP, where he taught 2 or 2 decades.

03:38 - As I said, a regular attendee and author of Valley Forge Winter,

03:44 - a 2002 book published by Penn State University.

03:47 - Press and numerous other articles and book chapters.

03:51 - Sitting, all the

03:52 - way to the end of the table closest to me is Chris Pearl.

03:55 - Chris is a friend I've made it to just a few years ago,

03:59 - but we've become very good friends and close colleagues.

04:02 - Working together, reading each other's work.

04:05 - Chris earned his PhD at Binghamton University and has been an associate

04:09 - professor at Lycoming College since 2013.

04:13 - He's the author of several books recently, Declarations of Independence

04:17 - in Indigenous Resilience Colonial Rivalries,

04:20 - and the Cost of Revolution, published by UVA press in 2024.

04:25 - Before that, from independence to the Constitution reconsidering

04:29 - the critical period of American History.

04:31 - Also, UVA 2022 and conceived in Crisis.

04:34 - The Revolutionary Creation of an American State, published in 2020.

04:39 - And he's also the program chair for this conference.

04:42 - So thanks for putting together such an awesome program. Chris.

04:48 - And last but

04:48 - never least, seated between, Chris and Wayne is Marcus Gallo.

04:52 - Marcus who?

04:53 - I've just really having the opportunity to meet with this project

04:57 - and at this conference.

04:58 - I'm looking forward to our future friendship and, and collegiality.

05:03 - He got his PhD at Cal Davis, and is has been the associate

05:07 - professor at John Carroll University since 2014.

05:11 - He's the author of several articles and book chapters.

05:14 - And the one that I read that I really enjoyed, that led me to put him

05:18 - on this panel is property Rights, citizenship, corruption and Inequality.

05:22 - Confiscating loyalist estates during the American Revolution,

05:26 - published in our very own Pennsylvania History in 2019.

05:29 - So, please join me in welcoming our panel, and I'll turn it over.

05:36 - To Wayne Burke.

05:57 - Okay.

05:57 - Good morning.

05:58 - And thanks for that, generous introduction.

06:01 - I remember, meeting Paul, but I don't remember

06:05 - the specific circumstance, except that it was in Philadelphia.

06:10 - Okay, let me begin with the, dog ate my homework portion of the,

06:14 - program, because when, Paul emailed me a year

06:18 - or so ago, asking if I would, participate,

06:21 - in this meeting, etc., he laid out the things that he wanted covered.

06:26 - Relating to the, American Revolution in Pennsylvania,

06:30 - assessing the scholarship, over the last 50 years, since the bicentennial,

06:35 - to a survey of the current landscape of that, scholarship

06:40 - and three suggesting, avenues for future study.

06:45 - And, my, hung up the phone or got off the email.

06:49 - I can't quite remember them. The medium.

06:51 - And as soon as I began to think of that, and he wanted it

06:54 - to be in 2500 to 3000 words.

06:57 - And that's the way I write.

06:59 - We're looking at, 30,000 words.

07:02 - So I knew it, wasn't going to work.

07:05 - So I'm going to read to you, the paper that I ended up putting together

07:09 - and trying to try to be, kind of more concise about that.

07:15 - When Paul asked

07:15 - me to give the paper, he also, pointed out

07:19 - that having pens library at my disposal would make it a cinch.

07:24 - And I didn't have the heart to tell him that I didn't have a library card.

07:28 - Even though I was still around there, because the McNeil center

07:31 - and the old Philadelphia center had decided to cut back

07:35 - on its kind of one time privileges, etc..

07:38 - But I did have a library in my apartment,

07:40 - books that I taught from over the years.

07:44 - There were dozens of them seem seemed almost like hundreds of them.

07:48 - And since I had never organized them, had never,

07:51 - put them in any kind of coherent order, I had to kind of look at them

07:54 - and in a different way than you normally would.

07:57 - And I think having to do all that work kind of, was a helpful thing.

08:02 - It was not fun.

08:05 - Okay.

08:06 - So, as I read those books or reread them, skim them, took notes, etc..

08:12 - The first idea that popped into my head, more of an intuition.

08:17 - Really?

08:18 - Was that what I was reading did not feel like

08:21 - or smell like or look like, or paradigms shift.

08:25 - And the term paradigm, was hot.

08:29 - When I went to graduate school at Penn in the 1970s,

08:32 - and I've come to think that it's not necessarily a good idea

08:36 - to take an idea that was hot, a long time ago and sort of, last yourself to it.

08:42 - But I did,

08:44 - so I'm going to work with that.

08:46 - Efforts by humanists to use history

08:49 - and science methods is described in Thomas.

08:52 - HQ and Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and their work

08:56 - were trending in the Penn history graduate program when I went there.

09:00 - And, pretty soon that was all anybody wanted to talk about and argue about,

09:04 - you know, what paradigms were, where they were, etc..

09:09 - A few years later, they had, the passion for that had considerably, cooled.

09:16 - And I didn't

09:17 - use paradigm in many of the research I did at Valley Forge.

09:21 - I was part of a, team of, abd de scholars,

09:27 - hired to, do research in support

09:30 - of a park general management plan and a park,

09:34 - interpretive plan.

09:38 - In the mid to late 1970s, when Valley State Park

09:42 - was becoming a national park, etc..

09:48 - And, we did a pretty good job, I think.

09:52 - We visited hundreds of archives and we got to collect

09:55 - thousands, literally, of manuscripts.

09:58 - Two of us were, retained at the end

10:01 - of the research portion of the project to write,

10:04 - a final report or multiple volume final report that park planners could use

10:09 - to, carry out legislative manning,

10:13 - mandate for establishing the park

10:19 - and I shouldn't

10:24 - printed this back in the front pages, etc..

10:31 - And what I would like to do, I, had thought about making slides

10:34 - or something like that, but I would like to just pass this around

10:37 - because it's useful for people to be able.

10:43 - They're being lectured to.

10:44 - So that's from Valley Forge.

10:46 - And it suggests, the, the ways and the places and the manner

10:52 - in which both the Continental Army and the British Army were stealing food,

10:57 - confiscating household property, sometimes confiscating whole farms, etc.,

11:02 - in their desperate efforts to, succeed,

11:07 - in a military way.

11:16 - And, and then I,

11:18 - got a book contract from Penn State Press, years later to, during that,

11:23 - I called that my, inadvertent dissertation

11:26 - because when I went, when I took that job and went to the Park Service,

11:29 - I just had of that is a several month little interim,

11:32 - and then I would go back and work on various other things.

11:35 - So I came to call that my, inadvertent dissertation.

11:40 - And, I think that we did, a pretty good job.

11:45 - But we didn't do a

11:47 - really good job with, what became the subtitle of the book

11:51 - version, which is to say, Civilians and Soldiers at Work.

11:55 - Civilians are easy to characterize.

11:57 - They're easy to,

12:01 - render into a kind of useful tool, etc..

12:05 - We didn't,

12:07 - use the social history which we had also been trained on.

12:10 - In graduate school we went to many different schools, etc.

12:14 - We didn't use the social history revolution effectively with military

12:18 - history and the emerging landscape of,

12:21 - public history, etc..

12:25 - And part of what I'm going to say to you

12:27 - today is to suggest that that's still, an agenda,

12:32 - the paradigm,

12:33 - that we were talking about without necessarily acknowledging it.

12:36 - I've come to realize with, John Shay, John Shay himself was the paradigm

12:42 - in 1976, as a bicentennial

12:46 - present to the country, he published, a dozen or more articles

12:50 - that he had published over the years since, obtaining his PhD,

12:55 - in a people numerous and armed

12:59 - and his

13:01 - his suggestion that people needed to use the social history materials

13:07 - together with whatever particular subject sets they were working on was

13:12 - it was a good one, and we just didn't know how to use that effectively.

13:17 - We made, civilians in kind of, a character,

13:22 - that could be, alluded to, generalized from, etc..

13:27 - I think at the end of this talk, I'm going to try to suggest

13:31 - the emergence of, of the beginnings of a new paradigm, etc.

13:35 - And I think it's still on the agenda for, for the current generation,

13:39 - particularly junior scholars, etc..

13:42 - To do a better than a just a rhetorical job

13:45 - of integrating, military history,

13:48 - social history.

13:51 - And civic history, etc..

14:04 - And I would

14:04 - so I will suggest now that the,

14:10 - new paradigm while we're at that,

14:12 - does not, have probably the same, impact so far.

14:16 - Well, my candidate would be, Bill Penn set,

14:20 - who has already been alluded to here.

14:23 - Bill didn't publish a collection of his, essays, etc.

14:29 - Like that, but,

14:29 - I saw him work in Philadelphia, came down to Philadelphia on numerous occasions.

14:34 - I saw him work with, graduate students, not his own, senior scholars, etc.

14:40 - And, he really pushed, with a particular perspective

14:44 - on Pennsylvania sites where it was not geographically, specific,

14:49 - but with a particular, emphasis on Pennsylvania.

14:54 - He really pushed people to think about,

14:57 - you know, how you could use the, just all the different things that were,

15:02 - part of the, the new social history, etc.

15:07 - And, and I think

15:09 - what that particularly, is relevant

15:12 - for, the, the social history, etc.

15:18 - Is it's a brilliant, civilians and soldiers that were,

15:23 - if you pass anything around it, it has my sense of, of where each army,

15:30 - was, was, was most effectively trying to, take something away from civilians, etc..

15:36 - The civilians kind of become,

15:38 - you know, character actors, extras in a movie.

15:42 - Etc.

15:43 - And I think, I think the real, imperative,

15:47 - in the next generation is, is to work as hard on the social

15:51 - history part is as people want to do on the military history part,

15:55 - find out who these people were or find out what impacts, their experience

16:00 - with soldiers, British and American, had in the,

16:03 - development of the rest of their lives and careers, etc.

16:06 - It's.

16:11 - And I think with that, I'll turn it over to the rest of the panel and

16:15 - and, I'll be glad to take questions that are going to be taken collectively.

16:19 - Quotes. All right. We're not going to individual.

16:22 - Yeah.

16:22 - I'll be very glad to, take questions, suggestions, critiques etc..

16:27 - So thank you.

16:38 - One the game

16:40 - right?

16:48 - Right. Yep.

16:55 - I also don't have fancy slides,

16:57 - but I don't have anything in the hands of either. So,

17:00 - my task today, if think this is fitting.

17:05 - Washington. I have to pull my glasses out. That's great.

17:08 - My task today seems simple enough.

17:11 - Dress the state of the political history

17:13 - of the American Revolution, particularly in Pennsylvania, as evidence

17:17 - and scholarship of the last 20 or apparently 50 years.

17:22 - Thanks, Paul.

17:24 - If I were to take at

17:25 - face value, the myriad of state of the field

17:29 - addresses and history, graphic explorations published since at least

17:34 - the 225th anniversary of American independence a way back in 2001,

17:39 - to nearly today, as we continue to assess the field approaching the two 50th,

17:43 - the answer is actually simple political history is dead.

17:48 - It is medically siloed, contained to live out

17:51 - the last days of its useless life and death throes.

17:57 - And all the while,

17:58 - disinterested scholars, as Gordon Wood thought and wrote, to the irritation

18:02 - of many historians in 2015, turn their attention to what he deems,

18:07 - quote, fragmentary and essentially antagonistic social

18:10 - and cultural histories, recovering stories of the dispossessed,

18:14 - the women kept in dependance, the American Indians shorn of their lands,

18:18 - the black slaves brought in chains from Africa.

18:20 - Such stories, he bemoaned, do not help us understand

18:24 - how the United States came to be.

18:26 - Despite the

18:28 - heated and controversial tone of Wood's words,

18:32 - his assumptions stem from what I think Sharon Lowry,

18:35 - Jacqueline Beatty, Daniel Carpenter, Angela Murphy, and, Hughes.

18:39 - Huston recently articulate and I mean recent, as in the last issue

18:43 - that just a few weeks ago, as the continuing narrowness of the often

18:48 - accepted parameters of what constitutes political in political history,

18:53 - it's both Beatty

18:53 - and Houston argue political in early America is all too often narrowly

18:57 - confined to a realm dominated by those with the power and authority

19:00 - to make policies, develop electoral majorities, etc.,

19:05 - which in essence confines political history to predominantly white

19:09 - and male cast of characters, leaving all others as peripheral actors.

19:13 - In what Beattie termed sidebars of the grand narratives visibly manifested

19:18 - in textbooks as rectangular interjections.

19:22 - Right? That's true.

19:24 - And while it is easier, perhaps the norm, to trot out Gordon Wood

19:28 - as historiographical fodder, a sort of perpetual straw man,

19:32 - his vision of the demise of political history, though

19:34 - not necessarily the tone of it or his dismissiveness of new scholarship,

19:39 - is actually more widely shared than we care to imagine.

19:42 - In 2005, for instance, nearly a year after Pauline Mair

19:46 - delivered a state of the field address

19:47 - to the National Endowment for the Humanities Forum,

19:50 - the journalists, strictly speaking, published that address,

19:53 - which mayor titled Disjunctions in Early American History,

19:56 - along with a series of reactions by another number of rather important

20:00 - scholars Jack Rakoff, Peter Owen, Yvonne Higginbotham, Edward Gray and Paul Ray.

20:05 - And just so you can understand the thrust of that conversation,

20:10 - Paul Ray titled his reaction Political Histories, demise,

20:14 - in which he agreed with.

20:16 - Maher's disjunctions and predicted in aimless future

20:21 - for the historical profession, rapidly descending into antiquarian ism.

20:26 - Quite simply, Ray believed that the political,

20:29 - intellectual, and constitutional history of the founding of the United States

20:32 - had been replaced by, quote, niche histories,

20:36 - so much so that, according to him, college and university professors.

20:40 - And I was shocked by this.

20:42 - College and university professors don't even teach the political

20:45 - and intellectual history of the founding anymore,

20:48 - thus denying our students the tools that they need.

20:51 - If they are to function effectively and intelligently as citizens.

20:54 - So how we put it, I don't know what he pulled.

20:58 - He took

20:59 - well, there were notable detractors from this political declension narrative.

21:03 - Peter Owen, if, for instance, disagreed the predominant takeaways

21:07 - from mayor to rake off to Ray was that a new generation of historians no longer

21:11 - ask the big political questions, such as what caused the American Revolution.

21:16 - As Rakoff blithely stated, politics is dead.

21:20 - Yet Rakoff could understand why grad students and other

21:22 - early career academics had turned away from those big, important questions.

21:26 - Because from his perspective,

21:27 - and this is a quote of Rakoff, his generation had solved it.

21:33 - And his it in fact rake off argue their solutions.

21:36 - Dubbed in 1972, the Republican synthesis were so complete

21:39 - that they have been intact and unchallenged for a quarter century now.

21:44 - Somehow I think Gary Nash, Jesse Levin, Alan Kool Wyckoff, James.

21:47 - Sparrow and a host of others like Own Up to It, disagree.

21:50 - But the question was, after all, far from settled in 2005.

21:54 - In fact, it was not even settled back in 1977,

21:57 - just a year after the bicentennial and the outpouring of work

22:00 - it inspired and five years after Robert Shalhoub spider Republican synthesis,

22:05 - Thad Tate, taking stock of the field that year, quipped

22:09 - the results were so impressive as to a purely limited room

22:12 - for additional work in the immediate future.

22:15 - It wasn't agreement, Tait saw, but his exhaustion.

22:20 - And yet, despite that exhaustion,

22:22 - he already was seeing a new generation of historians challenging the prevailing

22:26 - notions, Rakoff would later argued, had been settled in the intervening years

22:30 - since way back in 2005, when I graduated undergrad.

22:34 - Makes some people feel old, makes me feel young.

22:37 - That's good.

22:38 - The idea that politics is dead or dying or suffocating or irrelevant.

22:41 - Choose your adventure here.

22:43 - It's been the luck motif of historic graphic explorations of the state

22:46 - of the field, such visions of a dying era of inquiry, especially considering

22:50 - the way historians have tied the political history of the revolution

22:53 - to state and national boundaries and borders,

22:56 - especially those borders start and end in eastern cities, counties

23:00 - and towns, has only accelerated since the introduction and embrace of vast

23:04 - early American nearly a decade ago.

23:09 - As a concept in a vantage point, vast early America moves beyond national

23:13 - and state narratives and history, graphic periodization and narrowly confined

23:18 - visions of the people a standard term of any history of the American Revolution

23:22 - for a capacious approach that can uncover a past that is infinite,

23:26 - infinitely complex, dynamic, globally connected and violent.

23:29 - Such an approach, proponents like Karen Wolff, Joshua Pike, or Steve Sarsen,

23:34 - they hope, will provide an early American history that fully grasp

23:38 - the depth, breadth, and complexity the vastness of early America.

23:42 - For them, this would be just good history, and it is good civics.

23:47 - Take that Paul Ray.

23:49 - And while the vast early America has created its own disjunctions,

23:53 - to borrow a phrase from Mayer, which Johann Neame outlined

23:56 - is between polity and exchange.

23:58 - And while I agree with much of what Johann identifies is still worth studying,

24:02 - most of those disjunctions that historians see, I would argue,

24:05 - are superficially imposed on existing and even future scholarship.

24:11 - After all,

24:12 - empires, nations bordered land, border less land, polities and frontiers

24:16 - still exist are explored

24:18 - within the work of historians who have readily embraced the

24:22 - and have identified their work as existing within a vast early American framework.

24:27 - Moreover, even the mission statement for vast early America still holds

24:30 - that the embrace of such studies will help us better understand the origins

24:34 - of an ambitious, powerful and democratic nation

24:39 - from a political history standpoint and point.

24:41 - Instead of being one more nail in the political coffin, vast

24:44 - early America and the work it is inspired forces us as Reeve

24:48 - Houston argues, to think of politics as a plural noun.

24:52 - Or, as Jacqueline Beatty argues, we need to recenter our definition of politics.

24:57 - How is it,

24:57 - she asks, that the term political history often focuses on the politics of men,

25:02 - while the political history centered on women is often

25:04 - referred to as women's history, petticoat politics, etc.

25:08 - The same could be said for a host of other studies that explore historical

25:11 - and political actors and grassroots organizers, often

25:14 - shunted to the margins of grand narratives of the revolution.

25:17 - Such a hyphen and definition of politics can only exist

25:21 - if we continue to conceive of politics narrowly.

25:26 - After reading such

25:27 - calls by Beatty and in Huston, I was struck by the of course we should

25:31 - of at all, but also a bit of deja vu

25:35 - as not to say, with Beatty and Huston

25:36 - and the rest of the forum, contributors had to say

25:40 - what they had to say is that innovative or new and far from it.

25:43 - Rather, scholars have been pushing for a more

25:45 - thorough inclusion of historical actors and peoples

25:47 - and the grand political narrative.

25:49 - The Revolution for for decades, as Huston succinctly

25:53 - put it, none save the postwar period has seen more innovative studies

25:57 - of women's, African-Americans, indigenous, and working class mobilizations.

26:01 - Yet the vast majority of studies

26:03 - have stayed in one of these artificially siloed categories.

26:07 - And while stories continue to chip away at the partition, this is what he said

26:11 - for chip away at the partition between political history narrowly defined

26:15 - and those siloed categories, the wall still stands, walls notwithstanding.

26:20 - Looking at the scholarship of the revolution in the past

26:22 - ten years, politics is far from dead or dying.

26:24 - It is just politics reimagined.

26:26 - The center of gravity is shift away

26:27 - from the kind of executive legislative wrangling, urban centric street drama

26:32 - and other post-Cold War era binaries, republicanism versus

26:36 - liberalism, radical versus conservative, or even conflict versus consensus as.

26:42 - The. So in the end, what I'm trying to say is politics is not

26:45 - dead is simply different from the debates that once dominated the field.

26:49 - Vast early America, with its intention to both border and border

26:52 - border less lands, and its broader, more inclusive

26:53 - telling of the revolutionary era and early American more generally,

26:58 - has never been devoid of politics, nor the nation or the states.

27:01 - In fact, revolutionary scholarship,

27:02 - which has effectively extended the sphere which Madison described as necessary

27:06 - to multiply interest and therefore check majority tyranny,

27:10 - has reshaped how we understand politics in the revolutionary era.

27:14 - For all the hand-wringing

27:15 - about decline of the interest and big political questions and ideas,

27:18 - it is also worth remembering that those big questions

27:22 - were often pursued with a narrow confines, or at least a narrow set of voices.

27:27 - But as Jay Franklin Jamison wrote in 1926, the stream of revolution, once started,

27:32 - cannot be confined within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land.

27:36 - And that land we now recognize was vast,

27:38 - globally connected, and home to diverse peoples, nations and empires.

27:42 - Today, more than ever, thanks to emerging scholarship,

27:45 - it is impossible to think about the political ideas of the revolutionary era

27:48 - without asking for whom they were meant and used is not simply

27:52 - that the long running debate over state republicanism versus liberalism

27:57 - and the revolutionary or now feels stale because it sits alongside

28:00 - or runs parallel to.

28:02 - Yet in contrast with the realities of slavery

28:04 - and indigenous dispossession, for instance, rather,

28:07 - because we no longer view these as separate parallel trajectories at all,

28:12 - they were far

28:12 - too intimately intertwined with the lived experience of early America.

28:15 - How, for instance,

28:17 - can we square the radicalism of Gordon Wood's account of the revolution?

28:20 - I brought my straw man back in,

28:22 - or the broader Republican synthesis as emblematic with the era of the era,

28:26 - with the work of Ned Blackhawk or Colin Calloway or Robert Parkinson,

28:31 - which demonstrates that race and othering not only mobilized

28:34 - a revolutionary generation to war, but also directly and reflexively shaped

28:39 - how predominantly white male revolutionaries,

28:42 - the usual subjects of political histories,

28:43 - conceived of their place, power, and rights in an emerging United States.

28:47 - Moreover, those revolutionary ideals were negotiated, shaped,

28:50 - and challenged by the agency and actions of diverse collection of peoples

28:54 - like those native nations that past historians often viewed peripheral.

28:58 - For instance, can we even begin?

29:00 - And I actually

29:02 - fundamentally believe this right now?

29:03 - Can we even begin to understand the American Revolution in Pennsylvania

29:07 - without including indigenous settlers, speculator and government

29:10 - agent divides and struggles in the Ohio or Susquehanna River Valley?

29:13 - Can we?

29:15 - I don't think so.

29:16 - And I don't mean here an embrace of settler colonialism as the cure all.

29:20 - I think it's useful,

29:22 - but that an understanding of the revolution demands new questions,

29:25 - fresh vantage points, and, dare I say, abandoning what T.H.

29:28 - Breen and Jessica Roney have described as fictive, superimposed

29:32 - revolutionary timelines based around seminal events.

29:37 - According to Roney, plotting such events along an axis, historians bring their own

29:41 - set of assumptions about space and time, and therefore an implicit teleology.

29:46 - That is not to say that those seminal events,

29:47 - like the proclamation line or stamp back to the course of acts

29:50 - or the Constitutional Convention are somehow unimportant.

29:54 - Rather, other events need to be brought into focus alongside them,

29:57 - and timelines and geographies expanded to more adequately explore

30:00 - and explain the people, their experiences and their motivations.

30:07 - As a hamlet,

30:08 - Hamilton and Catherine Duvall powerfully demonstrated need.

30:11 - Nations were fundamental part of early American experience,

30:14 - and their actions, decisions, hopes, desires

30:17 - shape the political foundation of all the Americas and their futures.

30:20 - The same could be said for women whose political choices and experiences

30:24 - influenced the trajectory of the revolutionary era.

30:26 - Whether Elizabeth Feeney petitioned for a divorce from her husband in 1782,

30:31 - she explained it that she had a quote right to comfort and happiness.

30:36 - She not only expressed fundamental political ideals,

30:39 - but the mere act of petitioning was an important political process

30:43 - that required a response from the government and therefore,

30:46 - regardless of the outcome, forced the political decision.

30:50 - And more importantly, she was not alone on us.

30:53 - Ireland is shown Esther to Burt Reed, the wife of President of State

30:56 - of Pennsylvania Joseph Reed, was the more astute

30:59 - politician and used patriarchal expectations

31:02 - and structures to her advantage to shape the politics of not just her husband,

31:07 - but a much larger network of people in and outside the Commonwealth.

31:11 - In the same vein, enslaved and free Americans mobilized both

31:14 - individually and collectively, trying to shape their own futures,

31:18 - but in the process altered the contours of the war

31:20 - and the consequences of revolution, both for good and for ill.

31:24 - One need look no further than enslaved and free people in Chester, bucks,

31:27 - Cumberland counties who mobilized against slavery and the slave trade

31:31 - not just in Pennsylvania, but across the nation.

31:34 - Or the numbers of enslaved people, petitioned legislatures for the freedom

31:37 - or absconded to join the British Army during the war, which in and of itself

31:41 - generated a substantial political dialog with lasting consequences

31:45 - for the United States

31:46 - rather than a progressive march forward through several events, there were

31:50 - still other events, both large and small, existing among between and beyond.

31:54 - A rather fractured scholarly timeline.

31:58 - And it

31:58 - might seem, therefore, even, you know, as I look over vaster America,

32:02 - that Pennsylvania's revolution confined it is to jurisdictional borders has little

32:07 - place in a more expansive scholarly orbit focused on vast early America.

32:11 - But I don't think that's the case.

32:13 - We simply need to move beyond the parameters of answers

32:16 - the 20th century provided to big questions.

32:19 - We need to sort of do away with all geographical focuses

32:23 - and assumptions, definitions of politics and scholarly timelines.

32:27 - And I'm just going to focus down, and it's only going to take me

32:29 - a few minutes, I promise.

32:30 - I know you're already thinking, just shut up, Pearl.

32:33 - So I've always thought,

32:36 - for instance, that Richard Allen Ryerson Books, 1978.

32:39 - The Revolution Now Begun, which explained political mobilization in the years

32:43 - preceding independence, was interpretive, hamstrung by its geographic focus

32:48 - on Philadelphia as well as its starting and end point, 1765 to 76.

32:52 - But really, it begins in 74

32:54 - can own substantially alter the interpretation by expanding

32:58 - that geographic scope of writers and work, and as well as the timeline for 1800

33:03 - with his book, Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania.

33:07 - But in my mind, especially as I was thinking like 2015 to 20 ish,

33:11 - both still suffer from what Polly Mayor described as a just junction

33:15 - between the colonial and revolutionary period historiography.

33:19 - The histories of both periods, even today, don't seem to speak to each other,

33:22 - and therefore we risk missing key elements of that tightly focused revolutionary

33:27 - mobilization and the causes and therefore consequences of the revolution.

33:36 - I think I tried to do that with conceiving crisis.

33:38 - I probably failed in the process by bringing the timeline back to the 1740s

33:43 - through to the 1790s, and explaining and expanding the geography

33:47 - beyond the city of Philadelphia.

33:50 - And that does not mean that I find Ryerson work in consequential

33:53 - and substantially changed the the history of revolutionary Pennsylvania

33:57 - inspired me and many other scholars to push still farther.

34:00 - But that's the goal, right?

34:02 - We need not be stuck in these interpretive,

34:04 - spatial and temporal quagmires as Charles McLean Andrews.

34:08 - And this is one of my favorite quotes, from, Charles McLean Andrews

34:11 - said the first ever volume of the William Mary Quarterly in 1944,

34:15 - the one indisputable law of history is impermanence.

34:19 - Right.

34:19 - And I believe, that only that only applies to historical peoples

34:23 - and experiences, but to historical interpretations.

34:26 - And we can

34:26 - and see these fundamental changes unfolding in real time in the past decade.

34:30 - Work by Patrick Spiro, Paul Moyer, Terry Boughton,

34:33 - challenges longstanding assumptions about Pennsylvania's colonial history

34:38 - and its implications for understanding the revolutionary period.

34:41 - The conventional interpretation depicts the March of Democracy is following

34:44 - an east west alliance between Philadelphia and frontier counties in the years

34:48 - just before American independence and the creation of a state

34:50 - that was formulated in 1901 by Charles, by Charles Lincoln, right, echoed

34:56 - in Becker in, his work on New York, and then fought and carried forward.

35:00 - I tracked this period forward in, Growth of Democracy by Theodore Thayer in 53.

35:06 - Then again, and Joseph Foster in 94 and Allen Tolley in 94,

35:11 - and then Richard Beaman synthesis

35:12 - a decade later, the varieties of Political Experience was still giving

35:15 - you the same argument about Pennsylvania's revolution.

35:18 - And because of newer work, they're demonstrating a complex cultural,

35:22 - social and political experience and grievances of the frontier.

35:26 - Intra and intra colonial rivalries in the agency and power of indigenous people.

35:30 - The idea of an East-West political nexus leading to democratic ascendancy

35:35 - no longer seems natural, straightforward or predestined,

35:38 - nor even applicable to all those mobilizing

35:41 - against both distant imperial authorities and domestic power brokers at home,

35:46 - as I recently noted, is as if the visions of the Revolution, though understood, is

35:50 - far reaching, cannot be viewed beyond geographically confined local parameters.

35:54 - Familial networks and past experiences and essence.

35:58 - Frontier settlers struggle to build new societies in their own terms,

36:01 - often at the expense of Native Americans as well as other colonies, empires,

36:05 - and states whose lands they coveted and whose removal they demanded.

36:09 - Local contests for power, authority, and resources frequently took precedence

36:14 - over the larger conflict between the Crown and the colonies.

36:18 - Colonial government, imperial agents, and later Congress and the states

36:21 - attempted to even to harness settler ambitions to achieve their own ends.

36:25 - But, as Andy Shakman observes, even seemingly high level imperial

36:29 - or Republican national policy was often driven and shaped by the locality.

36:35 - I also think newer scholarship in Pennsylvania's revolution

36:37 - has opened important questions and trajectories by embracing a broader,

36:40 - more vast perspective and moves beyond older interpretive frameworks.

36:43 - Rise of democracy.

36:44 - Revolution thesis I don't even think we need to be confined to that counter

36:49 - revolution thesis anymore, and I don't even know if it's applicable.

36:53 - It's kind of own.

36:54 - David, how have have basically shown

36:56 - because we are seeing a remarkable can continue to be of agrarian

37:01 - revolutionary ideology in action as Paul shows

37:04 - or for example,

37:07 - the state government created under 1790, as well as the newly

37:11 - established national government was just as comfortable.

37:14 - Perhaps more so, siding with frontier settlers

37:17 - and their violent disputes with native peoples over the land,

37:19 - as was the preceding democratic state government.

37:22 - And if we look at the work of Camille, Kaspersky and others,

37:26 - and we see that the state, the Democratic state, used coercive

37:30 - threats and violence against women and other people.

37:34 - You this story starts to fundamentally change about what

37:38 - we're talking about when we when we think about the American Revolution.

37:45 - I'm just going to end with, with this.

37:50 - Maybe.

37:53 - Right.

37:53 - Yeah.

37:55 - Revolutionaries like in the war.

37:57 - And I think this is really important for me in what I'm thinking about,

38:02 - they had to think about more

38:03 - than just declaring independence on paper or creating constitutions.

38:07 - They had to realize that a war had to be fought and won foreign

38:11 - recognition secured powerful native nations and peoples reckoned with.

38:14 - And state governments,

38:15 - as President Joseph Reed emphasized, need to be obeyed and respected.

38:18 - Those that those challenge, those challenges they face required

38:22 - fluctuations, reforms, coercion, violence, diplomacy, pleading,

38:27 - and a host of other strategies

38:28 - that forced Pennsylvania's weathered other as well as other states

38:31 - to engage with each other, as well as a diverse collection of people

38:34 - both at home and abroad, who did not share common habits, obedience and opinion.

38:38 - Whatever Rakoff may have suggested.

38:40 - In 2005, the causes and consequences of the revolution

38:43 - remain unsettled and perhaps always will be.

38:46 - Too much is at stake, but what is clear is that we are moving toward

38:50 - a more expansive and vibrant understanding of that tumultuous, revolutionary past,

38:54 - with vast implications for how we grapple with our present and future.

38:58 - And to me, despite what Gordon would would say,

39:02 - that helps us actually tell how the United States came to be.

39:06 - Thank you.

39:21 - Okay.

39:21 - So, like Wayne and Chris, I also do not have fancy slides.

39:27 - I just have these crappy ones.

39:28 - So hopefully you can follow along and it'll sort of prevent me

39:32 - from from rambling too much.

39:35 - So I've been tasked with looking at Pennsylvania's loyalists

39:39 - and what historians have said about that over the last 50 years or so.

39:44 - And I want to start off with a timeline here for us.

39:48 - So in 76, you've got the most radical state constitute,

39:53 - in Pennsylvania in comparison to, to any other state in the Union.

39:56 - And then in 77, the Philadelphia campaign brings the British

39:59 - into the state and occupies Philadelphia until the summer of 78.

40:04 - And that basically sets up the possibility

40:06 - for anti loyalist action and anti loyalist punishments.

40:10 - So you have a series of state laws, loyalty oaths, the Militia Act,

40:16 - treason laws that allow for people that are determined

40:19 - to be traitors, to be executed, have their property confiscated and so on.

40:24 - So that period after the British occupation,

40:27 - you see a couple of years up to about 1781 of treason trials,

40:32 - and the persecution of loyalists.

40:35 - And then there's a drop off and the politics changes.

40:39 - Basically, you go from having a radical government

40:42 - to an increasingly moderate government, and by 1790, you've

40:46 - got a, a constitution that really looks like every other state in the Union.

40:51 - So that's that's the basic, overarching story.

40:54 - But to really understand,

40:58 - you know, what the loyalist experience looked like,

41:00 - you kind of have to look at the details here.

41:03 - Who were the loyalists?

41:05 - To what extent were they even loyal?

41:06 - Really?

41:08 - Were they persecuted?

41:09 - To what extent were they persecuted?

41:11 - So I want to just take a brief look at a couple of classics here.

41:16 - And then there have been a number of books that came out in the last 5 or 6 years

41:20 - that the, give us a little bit more insight into some details in this picture.

41:25 - So the most comprehensive book on these questions of the loyalist

41:29 - experience, was Astor House Opposition in Pennsylvania to the American Revolution.

41:34 - So about 40 years old.

41:35 - And this originally was.

41:38 - Astor House attempt to have a quantitative history of the loyalist experience,

41:43 - which she quickly abandoned because she recognized

41:48 - that there really wasn't a through line here of a loyalist experience.

41:52 - In many ways, loyalism in Pennsylvania was completely anemic.

41:56 - You probably had more out and out loyalists in places

42:00 - like New England than you did in Pennsylvania.

42:02 - There was a very small core of active loyalists,

42:05 - but there are a large percentage of people that did not actively

42:09 - embrace the revolution that were not active patriots.

42:12 - So if you're looking at non jurors, people that are not allowed to to to be jurors

42:16 - because they haven't served in the militia or that they refused

42:19 - to take a loyalty oath, or they're just, you know, isolated that that may be

42:23 - as much as 50% of the population, 40 or 50% of the population.

42:27 - So a very large number of people are not active,

42:31 - participating patriots, in, in any way.

42:34 - Okay.

42:35 - So in order to try to explain this,

42:38 - she sort of dismisses a number of things.

42:42 - It's not really about religion, although there's there's some caveats there.

42:46 - It's not really about ethnicity.

42:48 - Instead, if you're trying to figure out why some people became active patriots

42:52 - and others didn't, you have to look at social networks in a particular place.

42:57 - So a couple of examples that she gives.

43:00 - If you're looking at Philadelphia in the pre-colonial era,

43:04 - there were two major political parties, and neither of those political parties

43:08 - focused on taxation during the imperial crisis.

43:12 - There was a big issue in that period, in the 1760s.

43:16 - And the big issue was, is the Penn family

43:19 - going to still run this colony, or is it going to become a royal colony?

43:23 - And really, because they're spending so much time and focus on on that issue,

43:28 - it allows the space for a third party to develop,

43:32 - that initially comes out of, the back country with the Scots-Irish.

43:37 - So, you know, initially it's the Presbyterians,

43:38 - but really that becomes the Whig party as they begin to incorporate other people,

43:42 - Philadelphia mechanics, etc..

43:45 - So by the time you get into the 1770s and you have violence in terms of boycotts

43:51 - and protests, there are many people, especially in the Quaker Party,

43:55 - that just sort of begin to to withdraw from the political scene.

43:59 - And it's obvious that they're not going to be active patriots.

44:03 - Okay.

44:04 - So if you if you use that concept of, okay,

44:08 - pre-revolutionary, ties, family networks, friend networks,

44:13 - what are your conflicts in the pre-revolutionary times

44:16 - that's going to determine whether you become a revolutionary or not?

44:19 - That says something interesting about what happens in the frontiers

44:23 - in Pennsylvania.

44:24 - So basically, you have these land disputes over

44:27 - who's actually going to control the northern tier of Pennsylvania

44:31 - because Connecticut has a sea to sea land claim, and Connecticut is actively

44:36 - selling, land titles in the area that's now Wilkes-Barre.

44:40 - So are people with Pennsylvania land titles going to

44:43 - to claim that, or people with Connecticut land titles going to claim that?

44:46 - That ends up, you know, a couple people die over these conflicts, right?

44:50 - Something very similar is happening in Pittsburgh with Virginia land titles.

44:55 - And the interesting thing is that if you look at,

44:57 - who becomes a revolutionary and who becomes a loyalist in these areas,

45:01 - the Connecticut folks are active patriots.

45:04 - So basically, in response,

45:06 - people with Pennsylvania land titles become loyalists in that area.

45:10 - And it's the reverse in Pittsburgh, right?

45:12 - People with Pennsylvania land titles become patriots in the Pittsburgh area.

45:16 - So she's saying, okay, this isn't about ideology, right?

45:20 - Or ethnicity.

45:21 - You have to really look at what's going on

45:24 - with with personal networks and local areas, okay.

45:26 - And that's going to explain things.

45:28 - And then, you know, it's the same thing for the wide variety of German sects

45:32 - that are pacifists, Mennonites and Moravians and brethren and so on.

45:37 - They, they can't become active patriots because it would require them

45:41 - to embrace a violent movement.

45:45 - So then once you kind of establish, okay, there's there's lots

45:48 - and lots of different reasons for, for being quote unquote loyalist.

45:53 - But, you know, these people don't necessarily see themselves as loyalists.

45:57 - And it makes a lot more sense to use the term disaffected.

46:00 - Right? They're not active patriots.

46:03 - But they're but they're not really, in favor

46:07 - of, of actively supporting the crown either.

46:10 - But because they're not active patriots, they're,

46:12 - they're getting harassed by the revolutionary government.

46:15 - So so then how harassed are they getting?

46:19 - An ouster?

46:20 - How basically says, well, not very, the threat of British control

46:25 - and loyalist control of Pennsylvania is not that great after

46:30 - the Philadelphia campaign is over, and there's not a whole lot of appetite

46:35 - on the part of the revolutionaries to really persecute

46:38 - these loyalists or disaffected people.

46:42 - So in in Osterhaus view, you've got a couple hundred people

46:46 - that are prosecuted, a handful are executed,

46:49 - and the amount of land that gets redistributed is negligible.

46:52 - So it's it's about a percent of, of the land.

46:55 - And that's going to, you know, .08

46:59 - percent of the population in terms of redistribution.

47:03 - Okay.

47:05 - Granted, the Penn family lost

47:07 - about 20 million acres and didn't really get compensated for that.

47:11 - But if you're looking at normal people,

47:14 - the argument here is, is that

47:16 - effectively normal people are not really punished

47:19 - for being loyalist or being, you know, not not embracing the revolution.

47:25 - Okay.

47:25 - Why is that?

47:27 - It's because of these local networks.

47:29 - People know who one another are.

47:31 - They know one another on a human level.

47:32 - They don't want to press their advantage unnecessarily.

47:36 - Loyalism is really not that big of a threat.

47:40 - So with more or less

47:42 - the same information, so, so that that was written,

47:47 - in the 80s, Frances Fox, sweet Land of Liberty is is written in 2000.

47:52 - And that's looking at one of these frontier, counties, Northampton.

47:57 - And it's saying, yeah, these, these local networks matter.

48:01 - And in fact, what they allow is

48:03 - for these old colonial era rivalries to,

48:08 - you know, mutate so that people can settle scores.

48:12 - Okay.

48:13 - So what he does is he's looking at a series of mini

48:16 - biographies of of what the revolution is actually like for people on the ground.

48:21 - And for many of the people that don't end up executed,

48:24 - their lives are nastily affected anyway.

48:27 - So he kind of has a litany of examples of, okay,

48:31 - here's somebody that, is persecuted for for being a loyalist.

48:36 - They're not a prominent loyalist.

48:38 - They don't really have any money.

48:40 - They shouldn't be in this list of, you know,

48:43 - a small number of people that end up getting targeted by the revolutionaries.

48:47 - But this particular person is just so irritating

48:50 - and won't keep his mouth shut that the local revolutionaries

48:53 - are going to are going to make sure that he loses everything.

48:55 - Okay. So there are examples like this.

48:58 - There are examples of former Moravians that are disgruntled,

49:02 - and they use the revolution

49:03 - as an opportunity to specifically target the Moravian community,

49:07 - or other revolutionaries that know that, you know, certain,

49:11 - sects have religious exemptions, but then the sects that are not

49:14 - specifically, known, you know, like, for example, the Mennonites,

49:19 - there's there's no specific order by the government to leave them alone.

49:23 - So then they can then be targeted in for, for harassment.

49:26 - A variety of examples like this.

49:28 - And he basically explains that the when people, are upset

49:33 - in their own revolutionary careers, then they use the loyalists

49:36 - as kind of a punching bag to advance their own career.

49:40 - So he's looking at basically the same numbers,

49:43 - and, and coming to a different, emotional conclusion.

49:47 - Right.

49:48 - That, you know, maybe these people are not executed.

49:51 - But their lives are not great during the revolution either.

49:55 - And that's basically the subtitle here.

49:57 - It's the ordeal of the American Revolution.

50:01 - So if if we take those two

50:04 - classic works and we look at, some of the stuff that's

50:07 - come out in the last 5 or 6 years, we get a little bit of a clearer picture here.

50:11 - So Aaron Sullivan's work on, the British occupation of Philadelphia

50:15 - shows that it's pretty miserable for, for most people.

50:19 - So the British looted, they set up military justice.

50:23 - They did not do a good job of making sure that people are fed

50:26 - or have a working economy.

50:27 - They're not going to accept American scrip.

50:29 - The Americans try to embargo and there's,

50:32 - maybe near starvation in the city during the occupation.

50:36 - So you have a handful of families that really do benefit,

50:39 - you know, wealthy elites from from this loyalist occupation.

50:43 - They're running balls and that kind of thing for British officers.

50:46 - But most people are very happy when when the British leave

50:49 - and it leaves them little appetite, to, to attack

50:54 - one another in the aftermath, they sort of want to put that occupation behind them.

50:58 - And that's what Larson found in The Trials of Allegiance.

51:02 - So what he saw was that in a variety of states, you have these treason trials.

51:09 - And in other states, people are happy to put traitors to death.

51:14 - And then judges intervene so that the war does not become

51:19 - this bloodbath against civilians in Pennsylvania is kind of the opposite.

51:24 - You can't find juries that are willing to testify against people.

51:26 - You can't find juries that are that are willing to say, yes, this is a traitor.

51:30 - He should be executed.

51:31 - And Larson goes back to Astor House.

51:34 - Explanation of this. You have a close knit society.

51:36 - People know one another as human beings.

51:38 - They don't want to take advantage of, you know, the opportunity of the revolution.

51:45 - But my co-panelists Chris Pearl looks at,

51:49 - you know, similar set of information and points out that, in fact,

51:52 - there are a bunch of executions,

51:54 - an unprecedented number of executions during the revolution.

51:58 - But they're not specifically in treason trials.

52:03 - So in many cases, you have loyalist bandits

52:06 - that are being executed for some other crime.

52:09 - And there's no need to say, okay, this is this is a treason trial.

52:12 - And that's the basis of, of the the crimes that this person

52:16 - is going to be executed on.

52:17 - In other cases, people are rotting in jail.

52:20 - They may die in jail.

52:22 - So, you know, the the actual numbers are not clear.

52:26 - Now, if we're if we're looking at the 68 people executed

52:29 - over over the course of the war is not an enormous number.

52:33 - But, you know, it's a factor of ten higher than, what what Oscar Howitt

52:37 - was talking about. Okay.

52:40 - And then the last,

52:41 - recent work that I want to talk about, right

52:45 - now is Paul Freeman's, looking at non-jury.

52:49 - And basically what Paul Freeman points out

52:52 - is that the Constitution a list coalition, right.

52:56 - The radicals that take over in 76, increasingly weaken

53:02 - their own political position by trying to force people

53:06 - into either the friend or enemy camp.

53:09 - And many Pennsylvanians recognize that, you know, this is this is bad politics.

53:14 - It's not really the reality.

53:15 - There are many people that are,

53:17 - you know, quote unquote, loyalists that are really not loyalists.

53:20 - And over time, you have a Republican opposition emerging

53:24 - that wants to pull back on these loyalty oaths and the oppression,

53:27 - the harassing of the revolutionary regime.

53:31 - And by the end of the 1780s.

53:33 - You have an ironic result, right.

53:35 - Paul Freeman says the debate about non jurors, Pennsylvanians who were never sure

53:40 - they wanted a revolution

53:41 - played a critical role in determining what the revolution would mean,

53:45 - because many of these people end up becoming the voters,

53:48 - that that send a new constitution into play.

53:51 - Since in 1790.

53:55 - So if we're

53:56 - looking at the basic questions here, who were the loyalists?

54:00 - Recent historians have basically said, yeah, there's a tiny core of loyalists.

54:05 - And what we really need to think about

54:06 - is this large percentage of disaffected people, how loyal were they?

54:10 - Not very.

54:12 - And to what extent did patriots punish them?

54:15 - That's really kind of in the eye of the beholder.

54:17 - Most people, or maybe an objective, population or populations

54:21 - looking at other revolutions would say this is very mild.

54:24 - Okay.

54:25 - Maybe didn't feel so mild

54:27 - if you were on the other end of it in, in the midst of the revolution.

54:31 - So if we're moving forward from here, making predictions about,

54:36 - making predictions, period is probably not a super good idea if you're a historian.

54:39 - This is not our area of expertise.

54:42 - But if we're making predictions about where this field is going,

54:45 - maybe in the AI enhanced future, as people are,

54:51 - you know, it's easier to get access to other bodies of work.

54:56 - We're going to see perhaps more comparative work with,

54:59 - comparing Pennsylvania's revolution to other revolutions.

55:02 - Cross-disciplinary work.

55:04 - I suspect that the the major question is going to be,

55:08 - why was Pennsylvania so mild in its in its treatment of loyalists?

55:12 - I think that's that's basically the, the crux of the issue.

55:16 - Why didn't Patriots

55:17 - take vengeance on people in the aftermath of the Philadelphia campaign?

55:23 - So that's what I've got.

55:24 - Thanks.

55:30 - Thanks very much.

55:32 - Thanks to all three of you.

55:33 - Very good.

55:34 - Just very quick comment and I'm going to open it up for for your commentary.

55:38 - I was looking for a through line, through these three papers and,

55:41 - and all I could think back was to my own graduate school experience 35 years ago,

55:46 - studying under Lance banning, banning, as you might know, as a political

55:50 - and intellectual historian, who has prepared his his dissertation

55:54 - committee was Bernard and, John Muir and JJ Pocock.

55:58 - Gordon Wood.

55:59 - And a little bit of Edmund Morgan sprinkled in there as well.

56:04 - And, and so when I had my first seminar in the American Revolution,

56:08 - and we had 12 weeks of political and intellectual history,

56:12 - followed by the last three weeks of the term, which on the syllabus

56:15 - read, the other guys and the other guys included loyalists, included military.

56:21 - It included women, African-Americans, Native Americans, frontiersmen

56:24 - and farmers, average people, what have you.

56:27 - And they were the other guys.

56:28 - Well, I went on to study under banning and wrote about non-English speaking,

56:34 - German immigrants and how they saw themselves

56:36 - as political actors and, and adopted Republican ideology.

56:40 - And my other fellow graduate students wrote about Native Americans

56:43 - and Baptist preachers and did community studies, all under Lance banning.

56:48 - And to hear Chris Perle talk about Gordon Wood the way he does.

56:52 - That man took an interest in me and my dissertation, to the point

56:57 - that he was as interested in it as anybody else.

56:59 - Even though he disagreed with the project altogether,

57:02 - he was very supportive of it. So,

57:06 - but, the through line I see between these three,

57:09 - is really the story of the other guys and the other guys or,

57:12 - or what has become important in Pennsylvania history.

57:14 - And it looks like is what's going to be important in the future.

57:17 - Wayne is telling us about military history.

57:19 - If we want to understand that in Pennsylvania, we need to look

57:22 - to civilian civilian civilians and and the relationships there.

57:26 - And that for that military story and Chris, for the political story

57:29 - is telling us that this broader definition of the body politic,

57:33 - is absolutely necessary to answer the larger political questions,

57:37 - that people like Jack.

57:38 - Rykov and Paul Rockey, want us desperately to continue to ask.

57:42 - And finally, Marcus, looking at loyalists, telling us that,

57:46 - you know, it's these nonconformist non jurors, the disaffected,

57:50 - who really are the story in Pennsylvania.

57:53 - And that's the direction we should be looking.

57:55 - So, I really enjoyed all three of these.

57:58 - Thank you very much.

57:59 - And I'll open it up to the audience for question and comment.

58:10 - Okay. And.