Matthew P. Dziennik is an early career fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on warfare in the early British Empire, with a particular emphasis on the empire’s use of non-English soldiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has taught in both the United States and the United Kingdom on themes related to the American Revolution and is particularly interested in the relationship between slavery and revolution and in comparative approaches to the American, French, and Haitian revolutions.
There is no coincidence in the date that I sat down to write this article. Monday March 17th 2014 – St Patrick’s Day. Two years ago, I was in the middle of New York City to witness first-hand my first St Patrick’s Day in the United States. Perhaps it was my rural upbringing that made […]
Reading Thomas Fleming’s fascinating article on “Celts in the American Revolution,” one is struck by the extent to which Scotland and the Scots informed and supported American independence. From the presence of Scots in congress, to the influence of common sense moral philosophy (Paine’s phrase was not coincidental), to the still-debated influence of the 1320 […]
Continued from yesterday. Read A to Z first. M is for mobilization. Revolutionary authorities became masters of mobilizing resources at a local level to fight the war. The war debts for the Continental Congress and the various states were massive, but it is impressive just how many men the revolutionaries managed to put into the […]
One of the great ideals of the American Revolution was the notion that political authority derives from the will of the governed. Of the key principles expressed by American revolutionaries, popular sovereignty – the idea that government should be an expression of the collective will and aspirations of the people – was paramount. What is […]
