Author: Taylor Stoermer

Taylor Stoermer teaches Public History in the Museum Studies program at Johns Hopkins University, is Visiting Curator of Public History at the Newport Historical Society, the American Associate for Past Pleasures Ltd., a television presenter for C-SPAN, the History Channel, and the BBC, and advises organizations like the Walt Disney Companies, Plimoth Plantation, and other historic sites, large and small, on heritage issues and museum strategy. Formerly, Taylor was Instructor of Public History at Harvard University, Chief Historian of Colonial Williamsburg, and Invited Research Scholar at Brown University. His academic work focuses on the loyalist experience and the relationship between political economics and political culture in the coming of the American Revolution. He is author of Colonial Williamsburg: The Official Guide (2014) and Public History: A Field Guide (forthcoming), as well as the lead essay in Loyalists and Moderation in Revolutionary America (2018), edited by Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore.

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Critical Thinking Posted on

Establishing the Tory Myth

Our understanding of loyalists in the American Revolution is a relic of the eighteenth-century turn from what one might call “constitutional sense” to a more “revolutionary sensibility” in Anglo-American political culture, a shift further reinforced by romantic nineteenth-century writers.[i]  To understand them as they saw themselves unfurls a rather different historical narrative. For most men […]

by Taylor Stoermer