Aaron J. Palmer, Ph.D. (2009) Georgetown University is Associate Professor of History, Wisconsin Lutheran College and Co-Director of the college's Honors Program. He was a fellow of the Harvard International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World and the author of A Rule of Law: Elite Political Authority and the Coming of the American Revolution in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1763-1776 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). He lives in West Allis, Wisconsin, and continues to research and write on colonial politics and the revolutionary era.
Charles Town, the metropolis of the South (today Charleston, South Carolina), was a leading location for duels in the late eighteenth century. One detailed example reveals much about the practice and about honor in general. In this case, an elite gentleman used every means available to him to defend his honor and police the bounds […]
Henry Laurens, one of colonial South Carolina’s wealthiest and most politically powerful planter-merchants, was a conservative by nature.[1] When the imperial crisis began to drive Britain and its colonies apart, Laurens moved cautiously even when he disliked British policy. When Laurens refused to join the Sons of Liberty in protest of the Stamp Act, a […]
