was the American revolution a civil war

**Rebecca Brannon, From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (University of South Carolina Press, 2016).**

51rsxcybgfl-_sx312_bo1204203200_ In her award-winning Liberty’s Exiles, Harvard University’s Maya Jasanoff offered a lively account of the Loyalist diaspora, those individuals who left the newly formed United States as a consequence of their Loyalism. In her highly anticipated appendix, Jasanoff stated that over 60,000 Loyalists left in search of a new home—but what of those who stayed? Until recently, the reintegration of some 400,000 Loyalists into American society has been an overlooked topic. As James Madison University’s Rebecca Brannon notes, “Historians of American Loyalism have long favored those who left . . . over those who stayed” (p. 5), and with her well-researched From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), Brannon takes a major step to address this obvious historiographical oversight. Continue reading →

The American Revolution Reborn, ed. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Between May 30 and June 1, 2013, hundreds of historians, teachers, and students came together in Philadelphia to discuss twenty-first-century perspectives on the American Revolution at a landmark conference, “The American Revolution Reborn.” That conference, which received and receives regular shout-outs here at The Junto, forms the basis for The American Revolution Reborn, an edited collection of essays designed to “upset the patterns of history inquiry that have defined scholarship for the past generation” (3). Much like The Oxford Handbook on the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), The American Revolution Reborn seeks to regenerate interest in the Revolution with “new perspectives” that, the editors and contributors hope, “will produce new interpretations of the past that move our understanding forward in new directions” (5). Continue reading →