Liberty's exiles : American loyalists in the revolutionary world / Maya Jasanoff.
Jasanoff, Maya, 1974-
2011
E277 .J37 2011 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

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Title Liberty's exiles : American loyalists in the revolutionary world / Maya Jasanoff.
Author Jasanoff, Maya, 1974-
Edition 1st ed.
ISBN 9781400041688
1400041686
Imprint New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
Language English
Description xvi, 460 p., [8] p. of plates : col. ill., maps ; 25 cm.
Call Number E277 .J37 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification 973.3
Summary From the Dust Jacket: On November 25, 1783, the last British troops pulled out of New York City, bringing the American Revolution to an end. Patriots celebrated their departure and the confirmation of U.S. independence. But for tens of thousands of American loyalists, the British evacuation spelled worry, not jubilation. What would happen to them in the new United States? Would they and their families be safe? Facing grave doubts about their futures, some sixty thousand loyalists-one in forty members of the American population-decided to leave their homes and become refugees elsewhere in the British Empire. They sailed for Britain, for Canada, for Jamaica, and for the Bahamas; some ventured as far as Sierra Leone and India. Wherever they went, the voyage out of America was a fresh beginning, and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world. A groundbreaking history of the revolutionary era, Liberty's Exiles tells the story of this remarkable global diaspora. Through painstaking archival research and vivid storytelling, award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff re-creates the journeys of ordinary individuals whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. She tells of refugees like Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who spent nearly thirty years as a migrant, searching for a home in Britain, Jamaica, and Canada. And of David George, a black preacher born into slavery, who found freedom and faith in the British Empire, and eventually led his followers to seek a new Jerusalem in Sierra Leone. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant resettled his people under British protection in Ontario, while the adventurer William Augustus Bowles tried to shape a loyalist Creek state in Florida. For all these people and more, it was the British Empire-not the United States-that held the promise of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Yet as they dispersed across the empire, the loyalists also carried things from their former homes, revealing an enduring American influence on the wider British world. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, Liberty's Exiles is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative new analysis-a book that explores an unknown dimension of America's founding to illuminate the meanings of liberty itself.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Linked Resources Contributor biographical information
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Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
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List of maps
Cast of characters
Introduction: The Spirit of 1783
Part I: Refugees. Civil War ; An unsettling peace ; A new world disorder
Part II: Settlers. The heart of empire ; A world in the wilderness ; Loyal Americas
Part III: Subjects. Islands in a storm ; False refuge ; Promised land ; Empires of liberty ; Conclusion: Losers and founders
Appendix: Measuring the exodus.

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