Live Meeting at Stone & Key Cellars 435 Doylestown Rd, Montgomeryville, PA 18936
We recommend that you get here before 6:30pm to order your food and drinks before the lecture. Program begins at 7:30pm.
Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament’s attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy. Factional bickering over policy, violent extralegal regulations, and the dreadful experiences of conducting an imperial war while governing a demographically growing and geographically expanding population all led colonists and imperial officials to consider reforming the colonial governments into more powerful and coercive entities.
Using Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher Pearl demonstrates how this history of ineffective colonial governance precipitated a process of state formation that was accelerated by the demands of the Revolutionary War. The powerful state governments that resulted dominated the lives of ordinary people well into the nineteenth century. Conceived in Crisis makes sense of the trajectory from weak colonial to strong revolutionary states, and in so doing explains the limited success of efforts to consolidate state power at the national level during the early Republican period.
Book Purchase: To purchase this book please click on this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813944546
About Christpher Pearl: Christopher Pearl, Associate Professor of History at Lycoming College, specializes in early American politics and governance during the American Revolution. His first book, Conceived in Crisis, explores how the causes of the American Revolution and the chaos of the revolutionary war led to the formation of the state of Pennsylvania.
Pearl is currently a research fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.