Live Meeting at MaGerks Fort Washington – 582 S. Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington, PA 19034
We recommend that you get here before 6:30pm to order your food and drinks before the lecture. Bring $1 or $5 cash for our used book raffle and you could win a Revolutionary War book!! Program begins around 7:15pm, Lecture around 7:30pm.
In this revelatory and enthralling book, award-winning historian Richard Bell reveals the full breadth and depth of America’s founding event. The American Revolution was not only the colonies’ triumphant liberation from the rule of an overbearing England; it was also a cataclysm that pulled in participants from around the globe and threw the entire world order into chaos. Repositioning the Revolution at the center of an international web, Bell’s narrative ranges as far afield as India, Africa, Central America, and Australia. As his lens widens, the “War of Independence” manifests itself as a sprawling struggle that upended the lives of millions of people on every continent and fundamentally transformed the way the world works, disrupting trade, restructuring penal systems, stirring famine, and creating the first global refugee crisis. Bell conveys the impact of these developments at home and abroad by grounding the narrative in the gripping stories of individuals—including women, minorities, and other disenfranchised people. The result is an unforgettable and unexpected work of American history that shifts everything we thought we knew about our creation story.
Praise for The American Revolution and the Fate of the World
“Brings many unfamiliar stories and situations to the surface, making the American Revolution a much more important event in world history than many may have previously understood…. An excellent and interesting addition to Revolutionary War scholarship.”—Journal of the American Revolution
“The American Revolution ranged across the seas, upon every inhabited continent, and across a ‘vast global canvas,’ as Richard Bell so powerfully exposes. His masterful synthesis provides accessible and impassioned entry to anyone interested in understanding the nation’s founding from a dazzling, kaleidoscopic perspective. Highly recommended.” —Ned Blackhawk, National Book Award-winning author of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
“Richard Bell has woven a coat of many colors—in enviably handsome prose—from the Scots who mutinied against army service in America, the Chinese workers who reenacted the Boston Tea Party (with opium), the hundreds of ex-slaves who took refuge with Britain’s ‘Hessian’ allies, and more.”—Woody Holton, author of Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution and Abigail Adams: A Life
Richard Bell teaches Early American history at the University of Maryland. He has received several teaching prizes and major research fellowships including
the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. His first book, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, was published in 2012. His second book, co-edited with Michele Lise Tarter, Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, was published the same year. His new book, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, was published in 2019.