Dr. Robert C. Ingram and Dr. Brian Schoen, both associate professors of History at Ohio University, co-edited Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: the Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, due out in March 2015.
Additional co-editors were Patrick Griffin and Peter S. Onuf. the book was the byproduct of a conference held at Ohio University that brought experts from around the country and even abroad. The conference was in Spring 2010, funded in part by a grant from the 1804 Fund and in part by a grant from the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America Founding Ideas, Principles and History. It was the first conference put on by the George Washington Forum.
The editors produce a new perspective on the American Revolution, revealing how America—first as colonies, then as united states—reeled between poles of anarchy and sovereignty. This interpretation—gleaned from essays on frontier bloodshed, religion, civility, slavery, loyalism, mobilization, early national political culture, and war-making—provides a needed stimulus to a field that has not strayed beyond the bounds of “rhetoric versus reality” for more than a generation. Between Sovereignty and Anarchy raises foundational questions about how to view the American Revolution and the type of experimental democracy that emerged in its wake.
Between Sovereignty and Anarchy considers the conceptual and political problem of violence in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic, charting an innovative approach to the history of the American Revolution. Its editors and contributors contend that existing scholarship on the Revolution largely ignores questions of power and downplays the Revolution as a contest over sovereignty. Contributors employ a variety of methodologies to examine diverse themes, ranging from how Atlantic perspectives can redefine our understanding of revolutionary origins, to the ways in which political culture, mobilization, and civil-war-like violence were part of the revolutionary process, to the fundamental importance of state formation for the history of the early republic.
Ingram’s research concerns religion and society in Britain during the 18th century. He was awarded a Durham International Senior Research Fellowship at Durham University in England to study religion and the Enlightenment in spring 2014.
Schoen is the Fulbright-sponsored Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College Dublin in Ireland for the 2014-15 academic year.
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