Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
- Used Book in Good Condition
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 loyalistsâ€”one in forty members of the American populationâ€”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, Libertyâ€™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 Empireâ€”not the United Statesâ€”that held the promise of â€œlife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.â€ 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, Libertyâ€™s Exiles is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative new analysisâ€”a book that explores an unknown dimension of Americaâ€™s founding to illuminate the meanings of liberty itself.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Alfred A. Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2011-02-15
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781400041688

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Alfred A. Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2011-02-15
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781400041688

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

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