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Join us for a two-day conference hosted by the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and organized by Professors Linda Colley of Princeton University and Eliga Gould of University of New Hampshire. Registration is required and free. Lunches and coffee services included in registration.

Featuring a distinguished gathering of international scholars, the "After 1776" conference at Monticello will provide an in-depth conversation on the "age of revolutions in favor of liberty" - a phrase coined by Thomas Lee Shippen in a 1789 letter to Thomas Jefferson.

This was a turbulent age of revolutions, violence and reassessments, with major global upheavals occurring in the Americas, Britain, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific World. Many of these convulsions, however, had important features in common - among the most striking and contested in certain regions was the naively optimistic belief that these "revolutions for liberty" were changing the course of history for the better.

With an emphasis on the years between the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, conference presenters will examine the hopes, fears, arguments and de-stabilizations of the time. Presenters will address the political, constitutional, cultural, and scientific innovations that marked the period, and will investigate the era's shocks, violence and flaws. Challenges included the continued survival of chattel slavery, intensification of indigenous dispossession, continued marginalization of women, and the mounting costs of global warfare.