Join us on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, at 5:00 p.m. in Blow Hall, room 201, on the campus of William & Mary as we welcome OI author Eliga Gould (University of New Hampshire). Blow Memorial Hall is located at 262 Richmond Road.

An Empire of Love:  Rethinking the American Confederation, 1776-1789

With the Declaration of Independence, Americans began creating a new federal union based on the Articles of Confederation. That effort is generally viewed as a failure, yet as Professor Gould will suggest, the American Confederation produced several noteworthy innovations, including the expansion of religious liberty, the first efforts to abolish slavery, and the Northwest Ordinance.  Meanwhile, the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the Revolutionary War, led to a new round of treaty making in Indian country, while it forced Congress and the states to grapple with the legal status of overseas debtors and loyalists.  Together, the Confederation and the Treaty produced a dizzying range of possibilities — a new order for the ages.  The legacy of that new order, for good and for ill, is with us to this day.

Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.  His books include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution(2000), winner of the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute; Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (2005), co-edited with Peter S. Onuf; Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012; Japanese trans, 2016), co-winner of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize, as well as a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year; and The Cambridge History of America and the World (2021), volume 1, co-edited with Paul W. Mapp and Carla Gardina Pestana.  He is currently finishing Crucible of Peace, a global history of the least studied of the United States’ founding documents:  the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.

The Vast Early America Lecture series features a scholar whose work has strong cross-disciplinary appeal.