About

When we think of the American Revolution, we often picture a parochial drama: thirteen colonies squaring off against the British Crown in a spirited bid for independence. But this version of the story is only half the truth. In this lecture, historian and author Richard Bell invites the audience to rediscover the Revolution as a world war that unleashed chaos, opportunity, and transformation across six continents. From the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore, from refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America’s own. It was a seismic global event that redrew maps, toppled hierarchies, catalyzed migration, and accelerated new movements for liberty-and for empire. In this lecture, Bell traces the far-flung reverberations of the war through the lives of the people it displaced, empowered, or destroyed. Bell offers a bold new framework for understanding the Revolutionary War not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawling, high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea, shaped by commerce, diplomacy, propaganda, and contingency. This is the American Revolution as you’ve never seen it before: complex, global, and astonishingly relevant to the modern world.

Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland and author of the book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His newest book is The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.