Brown Seminar: Urban Geographies of the American Revolution
Join scholar Benjamin L. Carp on a tour through the urban spaces of the American Revolution. How did Boston’s waterfront geography become a flashpoint for rebellion? How did public gathering spaces in Philadelphia create the context for democratic ideas about mass politics? Can maps help us learn whether New York City was deliberately set on fire in 1776? Learn about these and other insights from a historical geographic approach to the Revolutionary period in a visually rich, interactive scholarly discussion.
Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College. He also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. He focuses particularly on urban politics, society, and culture in eighteenth-century America. In addition to his new book, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, he has also written Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (which won the triennial Society of the Cincinnati Cox Book Prize in 2013) and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution.
This talk is part of the Richard H. Brown Seminar on the Historical Geography of the American Revolutionary Era and was recorded May 30, 2023.