died. and the number assigned to me now. if nine are not less i want them less right quick. >> yes, sir. >> if i can't ever go to the bathroom, i won't go. i promise you i won't go anywhere. i will just stay right behind these black gates. >> presidential recordings. find it on the c-span now mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. >> listen to c-span radio with our free mobile app c-span now. get complete access to what is happening in washington wherever you are, with live streams of florida proceedings and hearings from the u.s. congress. white house events, the courts. campaigns and more. plus, analysis the world of politics with our informative podcasts. c-span now is available at apple store and google play. download it for free today. c-span now, your front row seat to washington, any time, anywhere. historical perspectives on

international and national affairs this afternoon good afternoon, everyone. and welcome to today's session of the washington history seminar historical perspectives on international and national affairs. this afternoon, we will be focusing on a recent book by robert parkinson of bingham on the university entitled "thirteen clocks," how race united the colonies and -- the declaration of independence. joining us this afternoon as discussants are derrick spires of cornell university and rose marie zaggarri. i'm eric arensen of the national history center. i am delighted to part that today's session is cosponsored by the alejandro institute and

with us from there is catherine kelly. for over the past decade, the seminar has meeting weekly in procovid times, in person at the wilson center, and since the pandemic, here in the virtual realm. this is the final seminar of the season. but we will return on january 23rd with a full lineup that will take to us the end of may. our announcement of the spring/winter schedule will be available in the new year. behind the scenes are two peoples who make these seminars people bill and rachel. and as always, we would like to thank our institutional supporters, the george washington university department of history as well as any number of anonymous individual donors and as we say every single week, we invite you to join their ranks. on the logistics front, note

today's session is being record asked can soon be found on our institution's respective website. when we get to the question-and-answer aegs session of the webinar we ask those of you with questions to use the raised hand funk. that's our preferred way of hearing for you. or you can use the q and a function on zoom. we will call on as many people as we can. now let me sbrus catherine kelly, the interim director executive director and director of box at the omohundra institute. a prize winning historian and editor, her interests focus on gender, culture and politics in the early american republic. she is the author of republic of taste, art, politics, and everyday life in early america published in 2016. i am happy she could join us today to introduce robert parkinson. catherine, welcome. >> thanks, eric. i'm delighted to be able to join you this afternoon, representing

the omohundra ins stootd. an independent research organization sponsored by william and mary jointly with colonial williamsburg and we study early american history and culture. logically enough. we sponsor fellowships and conferences, we sponsor a flagship journal, the william and mary quarterly, and we also publish a book series which includes any number of pathway and prize winning books including this most recent book by rob parkinson, our mission is to support the intellectual infrastructure that undergirds geographically, chronologically, and methodologicalcally transformative vision of the past. speaking of scholars who offer transformative visions the past, it is a real pleasure to be able to introduce rob parkinson today. currently an society professor

of history at bingham on the, his path breaking work helps us understand how important race was for the american founding. he is the author of "thirteen clocks," a book we were fortunate enough to publish and a book that is the topic of today's programming. his previous book, "the common cause" creating race and nation in the american rel revolution qug was awarded the james a. rawly prize and was recognized by the association for education in journalism and mass communication. rob is currently finishing a new book titled "the heart of american darkness, savagery, civility, and murder on the eve of the american revolution" which will be published by live right i am hoping we will hear about that provocativecally titled book a little bit today. first, let's settle in for a lively discussion of "thirteen

clocks." >> okay. so i will share my screen with you here. and have a little bit of things to tell but. so this is the -- okay. we should be good. yes? okay. good. okay. so the cover of "thirteen clocks" looks like this. a cover that cathy, who just very graciously introduced me, and i worked really really hard to get looking this good. thank you to the designers at unc press as well. for this -- so this starts out with the consent of "thirteen clocks" meeting 13 colonies comes from john adams' quote, and john adams when he looked like this, at 83 years old.

he and the undertoing generation were approaching old age, certainly were in the depths of old age. some people in the united states decided they really needed to know what happened in 1776. so they started reaching out to people to sort of cull their memories before they left the -- this mortal earth. one of those people was a baltimore journalist who received out to john adams. he said what went down in 1776? john adams had spent a long time thinking about this, of course, and he had been talking with -- corresponding with thomas jefferson about this very topic for the better part of almost a decade. so he had a very prepared answer for this. it is the common answer that is -- there is a series of letters that he wrote to jefferson about this, and also to his response to niles, which has framed how we think about

the revolution, and written about the revolution, about a very long time. since 1815, and 1818. but definitely in the last generation or so. i will get into that a little bit here in a minute. this is what john adams said. remember, he looks like this. it is important, i have his elderly picture, his portrait here, because i am going to show you a younger picture of john adams, which is a little bit different than him in 1818. he said, the colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, they were so great in variety of religions, we were composed of owen in different nations, their customs had little resemblance and their intercourse rare that to unite them this the same principles of theory and the same system of action was certainly a difficult enterprise, he said of the -- the enterprise being bringing the 13 clocks to strike as one. the completed accomplishment of it in so short a time and by

such simple means was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind. 13 clocks were made to strike together, a per effect fix no artist had ever accomplished before. he is talking about miracle in which he is hinting there is dove kens and maybe god or god high pressure like folks like himself who really brought these clocks to strike as one. and this problem of the -- of uniting the country -- or uniting the colonies as one is what i think shaped a lot of my work, the question of how -- how july 4th, 1776 comes about. it was part of the heart of book -- well, this book, which is "thirteen clocks," is an abridgement of something we don't really do in the

historical professionals very much anymore, which is -- we used to do it a lot, which is take really really big books and make them small books for teaching. that's in many ways what "thirteen clocks"ate -- at least that's how i thought it was going to be. and then it turned out to be something much greater than i had first imagined. it is an abridgement this book, which is my first one that came out in 2016, the common cause, which you really -- really, the best way to look at sit this way. it is 750 pages long. therefore makes it rather unteachable in any generation, but it seems like especially this covid generation. so i thought for a long, long time about how to distill the argument of that book, and think about this particular problem of the 13 clocks striking as one. the common cause, the subtitle of that is creating racial recognition in the heart of the revolution.

what i discovered writing that was that race lay at the heart of every single decision, every single -- the idea that -- that there are different stories here between -- there is the american revolution, which is about ideas and about ideology, and about natural rights, then there is the experience of revolution, which involves people, people of color or women or anything like that. those are different -- those are entirely different conversations. and what i found in my research is that those are so intertwined with one another that the argumentation for how to make the cause, the cause of fighting the revolution common was by turning to and employing all sorts of language, stories,

images, about slave insurrections and the story of violence in the back country, especially to indigenous peoples. that was what the leaders of the revolution turned to over and over and over again. they thought about the roles that african americans, whether enslaved or free, or indigenous peoples would play in this revolutionary time. they thought about them so consistently, and on an almost powerly basis, i found, more than if not daily, and certainly weekly. they thought about -- they thought about what role folks in those status -- i guess i can say it like that -- would play in the revolution all the time. and so -- and where i first went to look for that evidence about that came actually from what the next thing that john adams says to niles. he says this, if you want to know why i am right about what -- how the revolution came

about, he said, young men in letters of all the states, by the way, in his mind, he thinks about people who would become historians would begin the task of searching the pamphlets and hand bills in the 13 colonies to find out how the temper and views of the people had changed n. his other letter he writes about this same topic to jefferson three years before he writes to niles. this is adams' thinking about how -- how are people going to figure out what happened in 1776? they should look at print. that's -- for the common cause that's what i did, i went and looked at lots and lots and lots and lots of prints. instead of doing what previous generations of historians had done looking at newspapers and looking at either the essays that appeared on the front pages toer the advertisements, i looked at the really boring stuff in the middle, the short

paragraphs and small little notices that happened in the very middle of these newspapers that talked a lot about british agents, military officers, indian superintendents in new york or south carolina, naval captains -- you name it, people who are agents of the british empire who were especially in 1775 and 1776 who were doing their best to figure out how to end the rebellion by pulling any lever they possibly could. as a lot of them were doing -- it is not just lord bun doesn't more doing it in virginia, they were considering what roll enslaved appearance or native peoples in the back country might be the pulling that lever might be the thing that ends the

rebellion. and of course they are. because if -- britain is broke and this is an expensive prospect. if you could end the rebellion before the british have to do the really, really, really expensive thing like equipping an army, and paying it, and sending it across the ocean, and then funding it in america to put down this rebellion, you would be a hero in britain. so you have royal governors all over the place who are mulling over how to make themselves a hero. so they are thinking about making -- availing themselves of opportunities like these. and so what i found in the newspapers is patriot leaders really seizing upon that fact, and then publicizing it as much as they possibly can, and putting those stories front and center in -- if we think about this sort of -- a news feed,

using today's parlance of what people knew about the revolution. they knew a lot about these particular stories. and -- and so, if we were to follow elderly john adams's advice and look at print, what do we find in print? well, there is some stuff in there that i don't think he would be super keen about us finding. what i -- and i was really blown away by it. i was really blown away by the amount of talk, that it is hourly, that it's all the time, and so, therefore, i wanted to really sort of have -- have the archive itself, the thickness, the massiveness of this archive that i found, and i started out with newspapers but then went and looked and sort of cross-referenced it against the sort of the corresponds in the papers of the continental congress and the founding fathers and things. and those -- it became this

massive archive. and the reflection of course of this massivity is the thickness of this book. that there would be this many stories, and this much talk about -- about trying to galvanize the colonial population, welcome, by scaring them is something that -- really, by scaring them is something that really is at the heart this story. so my surprise came because -- because of the effect of these letters that john adams is writing. in that same letter he says what do we mean by the revolution? the war? that wasn't any part of the revolution. it was an fgt and a consequence of it. the revolution was this the minds of the people -- and this is effective from 1750 to 1775. s that very, very very influential quote. it is written by the elderly john adams who appears here on the left.

but it is -- it is about the john adams, the younger man, the one on the right is the john adams of the 1760s when bess 40 years old. i love this portrait of him because he's kinds of giving us a little bit of side eye here, kinds of showing a little bit of playfulness that i think reflects that -- if we were to go back and looks at these things like i did what would we find? we would not find that the war has nothing to do with the argumentation of what the revolution is about. it would not be something that is affected from 1760 to 1775, by that which he means this is about natural rights, common consent, about representation, it is about ideology, and it's done by the start of the war. that notion has had a particularly strong his torrio graphical effect. why? well, where do we find that

letter? we find that letter here, of course n this book, which i can't see how many people -- participants are in this session but i would bet that just about everybody has read in book. that letter appears before chapter 1 -- or before page 1 in chapter 1's book the revolution. it also appears that john adams plaj raised himself when he wrote that same thing to niles before chapter 5 of the book. that notion that the car had nothing to do with it, that it is a packaged thing. again, we have stheen lately in the last history wars about doesn't more's proclamation of 1619 and all the stuff that's been going on the last couple of months. i am sure we will talk about that more as the session goes along. but the idea that independence -- that everybody's on word as soon as the shooting

starts and that people's hearts and minds have been changed to such a degree by this ideological change that has had a tremendous his torrio graphical effect. i didn't see that at all. when the war starts, what role enslaved people and native peoples might play, that become the thing that people are reading about and talking about more and more and more and more, much more than talking about liberty, or rights. that's the thing that people are -- and as i was reading all these newspapers, i was reading the same story over and over and over again. i had -- i had this what i call sort of in the preface of "thirteen clocks" i had this kind of idea that i had a weird super power that i delivered where i would turn microfilm files to newspapers i had never

seen before and predict what was coming next. which is lame super power. historians -- instead of flying or being invisible this is the thing we would want, to go on and predict a primary source that's next. when i went home i thought about what it meant for revolutionary mobilization. that's what i began to think about how these same stories would appear in the pennsylvania packet, that would be introduced by order of the continental congress, would then appear in boston, and in new york, and annapolis, and williamsburg, and charleston. same exact story like today with modern news wires. or if a letter that is -- may or may not be a little bit manipulated by patriot leaders appears in boston. how it would then appear in the

exact same fashion because of how the newspaper business worked in new york and philadelphia and baltimore, and williamsburg and charleston. what does that mean? that, to me, was an important gear in the 13 clocks striking together. there are a lot of fears in the internal workings of those clocks about what made the colonies come together. one of the ones in the very center that we have really been -- ignored a lot is how the -- how patriot leaders like john adams and thomas jefferson really seized upon some of these stories because they knew that they were not controversial like -- like things like religion or even slavery. these were things that if you want to talk about what 18th century colonists have in common, its nightmares about slave insurrections and native

massacres. that is the one thing that people, no matter if you are a quaker, anglican or even a catholic. those are the things that people in america have in common. and you can get more people to buy in by making them afraid of this one thing that is making -- that in the 18th century is the thing to be afraid of. so what we haven't i don't think talked enough about is how those stories are deployed and what that means. whats it mean, the idea of domestic insurrectionists and merciless indian savages working with the king is the 27th and final and climate particular deal breaker grievance in the declaration of independence. what does it mean that the argumentation for why we should come together and be one country and create a republic is -- at

the expollution of certain people, what does that mean? -- at the exclusion of concern people, what does that mean? i want to tell you one thing. for me, the how of it as much of the why of it -- the how of how the 13 clocks come together of the it moons so much. because we know that the revolutionaries did some really radical thing. they made major changes to colonial political life. they -- there was a significant attack on aristocracy and established churches. and they really did transform meanings of representation and consent. and they also decided, made the conscious decision to throw away monarchical sentiment into it and embrace democracy.

that didn't happen before. in the seven years war, stories about native massacres scared everybodyings and sort of galvanized people. or jilla pour is right that those things happened in the new york industries of 1741, or the -- flips war or going back to the beginning of the colonial period. what didn't happen in any of those cases before was there was also an effort in making a new nation, a new republican regime based on a very different political theory of citizenship that they isn't didn't even really understand in 1776. and that, therefore, the members of the club were able to make decisions about who was in and who was out. and that's why these kinds of founding stories about -- about african americans and indigenous people supporting the crown continued to have a very significant effect about who was deemed to be in and out of the

country. that could be directly, logistically the case in some places, legally in and out. but it's also contributing to this notion that some some people belong here, and some people don't. and so what "thirteen clocks" welcome looks at the is prevalence of these stories, and why they matter for us today in the -- what john adams and his colleagues did in 1776 when he was a younger man and not an 83-year-old man, how they made that happen is really important to us today and we should go back and look at it and not rely on his elderly say-so for what it is. that's enough for me. >> thank you very much. our first discussant this afternoon is derrick r. spires, an associate professor of

literatures in english, an affiliate faculty in studies at cornell. he specializes in early african american and american print culture, citizenship studies, and african american intellectual history. in his first book, "the practice of citizenship, black politics and print culture in the early united states" published by university of pennsylvania press in 2019 won the modern language association prize for first book and the bibliographical society merck an tile prize and was nominated for the -- book award. he is also also author of a work published in 20 0. national endowment for humanities, the social signs research skill, and ellen mays -- derrick, the floor is yours. >> thank you. thanks to the organizers for bringing us together.

thanks to robert for writing this incredible book. the teachable version. two incredible books, i suppose i should say. i also want to acknowledge that i am speaking to you from the terrible home lands of the -- nation members that figures in part in robert's book. reading "thirteen clocks," a book about the stories revolutionaries told about themselves, i couldn't help but think of letters from an american farmer the book pubbished by any number of names in 1782 that purports to be the authentic account of the years leading to revolutionary war by a farmer named james from pennsylvania. james travels to several colonies not unlike adams and suggests each region had its own distinct character. he decries the luxuries gained from enslaved labor in south

carolina, and compares it to south america in a more spanish style of life. he suggested the back country was a land of lawlessness that would eventually become settled. and he describes the american as a new race. quote, they are a mixture of english, scotch, irish, dutch, german asks swedes from this promiscuous breed, that race now called americans have arisen. end quote. that is, white men of angelo saxon who read their newspaper, kept their religion to themselves, and were on the whole benevolent enslave evers. this account of who was an american takes me to two moments in the book. first, parkinson's contention that quote a shared sense of trust and unity will require some forgetting. he keep coming back to the notion that trust and unit require forgetting and it feels a bit like deja vu right now. that is an alchemy in which all

the differences farmer james notes could be -- in the shared project offet contracting a new american race. we could see how patriots and their print supporters intentionally amplify for instance fear around indian incursions not only in newspapers but also in book covers. for instance, i will share with you one of my favorite books to teach in the early american lit seminar. two covers from perry rollinson's captivity narrative. the first is from 1682. one of the first editions published in cambridge. and then the second one is from 1773. and you can see a really notable difference. and i would say especially after reading parkin son's book, that this difference is not just about the technology involved in having an engraving on the

cover. right? it initially emphasized her devotion to christianity, her safety, et cetera. by 1773, granny as has a gun. granny is the patriot, granny is protecting the household. this is from boston in 1770. this is my granny with a gun. i say that because my grandma had a gun. this is 1773 cover that really illustrates the ways that a particular brands of americanism is shaped as the patriot protecting home from the incursions of the savages of various kinds. so parkinson's account of revolutionary print culture, especially from all the newspapers helps us visualize a kind of circular process in which an event -- the --

proliferation of french in the early 19th century in particular created a sense of print nationalism through shared text what we learned though, is that these shared texts were not sort of passively generated shared what we learn, though, that she is shared texts were not sort of passively generated shared texts. they were intentionally crafted. this stands with what trish lock again used in print in the way that print culture wasn't this evenly distributed happy and magic community. it was actually frakt track shows and fractured.

what we see in this sweet spot between '73 and '76 is a moment when, through a number of, shall we say crafted coincidences, right, the "thirteen clocks" click into place both because of circumstance asks because of patriots taking advantage of circumstance. and realizing that fear can create a sense of cohesion and people responded to it. it is an important part in the circuit. it is one thing that patriots played up on the racial or prejudice additional animus. another thing to note that people responded to it and were galvanized by it. the other thing i would note in the moment i have to reflect on the book is that if print was the life blood of the revolution, the business of enslavement helped keep that blood pumping. the booed gives fresh context to

how race gets made through the sale of freedom ads for the sale of enslaved people. the boston gazette offers an ad for a likely negro, and also advertises for a fugitive named caesar. important to note that you would go to the newspaper office to collect the reward. it is not just that newspapers were sort of passively reprinting ads. it was part of the business model. right? so, again this feeds into the kind of feedback loop where stoking fears could actually generate revenue for newspapers and create a sense of cohesion. so questions. why does this reframing of the american revolution as essentially a history of american whiteness or degeneration of american whiteness important? why is it important that we take up the question of how organizers used whiteness as one of several connective tissues that would make a united states?

i think part of the answer is in the way that parkinson's strange racialization as a strategy and a choice. the writers had a set of tools before them and made the calculation that some tools would be more effective than others. the other thing i want to know, though, is that by the 1830s, black historians would be taking up this moment, too. they would be among our first revisionist historians. for instance n 1838, pennsylvania, as the state of pennsylvania was about to restrict voting rights to white men, black pennsylvanians published an appeal that 40,000 pens pnians threatened with disenfranchise member. and they cite the articles of federation. and then, they cite minutes from the convention noting that the states voted down by a marriage of 8-2-1 a motion from south

carolina to include the word "white". i bring this up because it reminds us, like parkinson's book that revolutionaries were constantly thinking not only about enslavement, but also race, they were making race in the moment through letters, articles, and law. and these pennsylvanians reminded us in 1838 once again that other choices were available. the revolutionaries not only knew better. they could do better. some tried it leads me to rethink the notion of citizenship as a club that parkinson gives us. yes, perhaps it is a club. like that metaphor. but there were already people inside, too. and those people inside were going to have their say. so thank you. and i am looking forward to a discussion. >> thank you. robert, would you like to respond? >> yes, i will say this,

derrick. i have papers taped to my monitor to reminds me and sort of on the shelves around me that remind of what this is really about. and one of them -- and there is -- circularity is one of them, events, discourse, policy, event. it goes back into the circuit. i don't know if you have been snooping around my office, but the -- but that -- for you to pick up on that, that is a really really excellent point. that is one of the things that i am trying to think about this, how these -- an even would happen, how it gets portrayed. that's the real sort of moment, and it is extraordinarily important for things like kreb kerr's wyoming massacre for example. how that gets portrayed leads to different policies including things like the sullivan campaign to eliminate the tib in 1779 and how that then sort of

goes back and forth and how you tell stories about that. so that's really really important. contingency is the really important subtext of the whole book, things could have turned out very differently. and you see this in, like, the example i always think about is something like the french. certainly, the french are seen as, for generations, since the end of the 17th century, they are the most hated and feared enemies. and then by 1782, there is bostonians celebrating the birth of defaunt. so how is it that the french can be redeemed in so quick a manner but other people cannot? what's going on here? so there are moments of revolutionary forgetting, amnesia, of real sort of creativity on the fly about thinking about people. and i have -- i talk about the

german mercenaries in the same kinds of way. but some people can't. and so -- and why -- and it is about that kind of moments of story telling that i think that double down and triple down that are really important at this moment. >> thank you very much. before we move on to our second discussant i would ask those of you in the audience with questions to remember that you can use the raised hand function and you can actually get in the queue now and get ahead of everyone else. or you can use the question-and-answer funk itself. if you prefer not to use the chat function, i have a limited ability to multitask here between parts of the screen. so q and a function if you want to write your question. raise hand if you went to direct it yourself. and now, our second discussant is rose marie zaggarri university professor and professor of history at george

mason. she received her ph.d. from yale and is a specialist in early american history and women's history. she's the author of numerous articles and books includes the politics of size, representation in the united states, 1776 to 1850. a woman's dilemma, mercy otis warren, and the american revolution, and revolutionary backlash, women in politics in the early american republic n. 2009-2010 she served as president of the society of historians for the early american republic. rose marie, the screen is yours. >> thank you all, all the audience for coming and attending virtual and for the wilson center and the american historical association for sponsoring this. i think especially in these pandemic times this intellectual community is really important and necessary to keep going. so -- and thank you for having

me. and thank you, rob, for writing these books, this book in particular, "thirteen clocks." i should say up front that i am an avowed champion of this book. i am a blurber on both books. so, you know, my support for, and enthusiasm for the books i don't think is in doubt. i think what rob has done here is an extremely important intervention in our understanding of the american revolution, in our understanding of the history of race in the united states, and in our understanding of the origins of some of the contemporary dilemmas that we find in our nation today. i know you didn't write it actually originally with that purpose in mind that it is to explain our current dilemmas, since you began writhe it in the early 2000s.

but it is an extremely timely work that i think really reflects very importantly on a lot of the issues we are dealing with today in the united states. so that said, i want to highlight a few thing that i find especially important or insightful in book. and then i would like to move to some criticisms, reservations, or at least -- at least points that i would like the discuss further with you about the book. or the audience. here's what i would like to -- for to us think about. first of all, i think one of the things that strikes me about "thirteen clocks" is -- i mean, it's an amazing accomplishment, amazing distillation of this 700 page book into 200 pages that preserves the core of your argument about the importance of race in the leadup to the

revolution because your book concentrates on the 15 months prior to the declaration of independence and to the declaring of independence itself. and so i think that that's extremely important that you do that and show how profoundly -- first of all, fractured the country was. i think that's a point that a lot of, in the traditional narrative, or the popular narrative of the american revolution, people don't understand how divided the colonists were. even white colonists were just spread out across a very large country, a very large north american continent, i should say. and they were much more attached to their own individual colonies or to great britain than to each

other. so there were often boundary disputes. there were often feats about who should pay for fighting indians, for example. there were -- there was not a lot of mutual understanding or recognition of the commonalities that united these mainland north american british colonies in the decades prior to 1776. and so i think it's really important that you stress that and that the question you pose is, what made americans come together? what makes the 13 clocks strike at once? and you know, i love that metaphor of john adams' because it points to how difficult, if not almost impossible, it is to make that happen. and so i think that's a really important kind of groundwork that you play in the book that gives people a real sense of the

state of play in the cole sees, the north american mainland british colonies in the decades before the revolution. you also provide an incredible level of insight into the nature of the technological revolution occurring in the colonies in the decades leading up to the revolution and during the revolution. and that is the revolution in print culture. again, you don't make the contemporary analogy, but that revolution in print, in the printing of newspapers in particular, but of pamphlets, of all sorts of documents revolutionized the way people thought. and you know, one -- some historians say, you know, the number of newspapers doubled in the decades prior to the american revolution, then doubled again after. and this kind of change only

comparable to the kind of change we have experienced in our own lives with the advent of the internet, with, you know, with digital media. and, again, you didn't write the book with that analogy explicitly foregrounded, but i think it's important for readers to know, and they see through your extremely exhaustive research into the print media of the time how thorough-going that print culture revolution was, and how extensive it was, and how penetrating it was, and how it really had a profound impact on the way ordinary people thought. not just political elites, but way ordinary people thought. i hasten to add that the rate of literacy in the north american british colonies was among the highest in the world at that time, even higher than in great

britain. and in new england, white males, it was approaching universal literacy. and even for white women in new england, you know, perhaps 60 to 70%. maybe about half that in the south. but, still, that's a lot of people who can read, and a lot of people who can read these new printed materials that are, what? that are doing what you show us, which is spreading fear. and so, you know, i think that what you see here is that, you know, there is an effort by political leaders and by news makers, news printers, partly to sell publications by the way, as derrick pointed out, to capitalize on that fear by printing these articles that scare people. and they scare people about things they are most susceptible

to being scared about, especially indian massacres and slave insurrections. and funded by the british, promoted by british. i think those are really important things. they just take a center stage in your book in a way that is very powerful. and i think help people to really understand the revolution in a very visceral way that is very different from a traditional narrative. i also appreciate your nuanced understanding to the question of race. race is in your subtitle. but in your introduction, you point out that you don't use that shorthand word "race "in your text. and you do it for good reasons. because the idea of race as a coherent category, as a

biological essentialism did not coalesce as you say and i think a lot of most historians would say until after the revolution. it was coming into being, but the words you use are very carefully chosen, prejudices, stereotypes, attitudes. and you used the words of the time, merciless savages, domestic insurrectionists, so you convey to us what people at the time felt, and you help us translate it into our modern term of race while warning us that that category of race had not yet taken on the rigidity or the meanings, all the implications that we have attached to it today. and finally, this was kind of a his torrio graphical point, but i think what you are doing here in many ways be considered as moving us beyond edwin s.

morgan's classic work american slavery, american freedom which famously posed the paradox and really opened the eyes of a whole generation of historians. not that other historians hadn't seen the problem before of slavery and talked about it, including some very important african american historians. but he framed it as a paradox. and i think for a long time we have talked about the paradox of slavery -- of slavery for black people, and freedom or liberty for white people. but i think what we are doing here is showing it's not a paradox. it is that white people actually used the subordinate condition of people of color to advance the cause of liberty that, in fact, it was a motivator. it was one of the things that made the revolution possible. and so, you know, i still like

that idea that it's a pair dock. it's paradox for white people, not really for the people of color that are, you know, being portrayed in this way by white political leaders and white writers. so my thoughts or issues that i would like you to discuss or other people to discuss. so the first issue is kind of his torrio graphical, and for those in audience that are not early americanists, it might of the be of much interest. since i have it here, i can pose it anyway. you know, how do you align your argument along with bailen's ideological origins of the american revolution or with the classic arguments about the coming of the revolution as being caught -- you know, being

motivated, caused by the objections to infringements on american liberty, on representative government, on taxation without representation? and famously i think you kinds of -- not quite fair to bailin. i mean he's talking about ideology too and also uses print culture. but he is talk mainly about pamphlets, talking about a triad, slavery, corruption, and conspiracy that he sees these themes in these pamphlets that americans are mobilized bichlt he mean, he has a parallel argument to you or you have a parallel argument to him. the motivation is different. and he's saying that, you know, americans oppose liberty against power, civic virtual against corruption. you know? so are your arguments compatible? how does your argument fit with

the idea, with the more intellectual arguments, the -- about taxation and representation and representative government. >> because, arguably, and as many other historians have argued, those did provide causes, bonds of unity between and among the colonies. in one of those quotes, the 1818 quote of january adams, he says what you united people are principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections. okay? you were talking a lot about sentiments, all right? okay? what about those principles and opinions? how would you -- are those interpretations compatible? are you arguing that regionally that this -- the -- slavery and race argument and -- are more powerful? now i do want to note you do a

very good job of looking at newspapers from all over the continent, from all the colonies. but is it as powerful, say, in new england, as in south carolina? okay. so that's one of the things i wanted to ask you. but related is the whole question of fear as a motivator. okay? all right. so an older generation of historians objected to a similar argument. propaganda in the american revolution. and they said, oh, it's these elites manipulating these, you know, hapless masses who can't think for themselves. and then a whole generation of social historians said, no, no, no, the ordinary people have agency, have their own ideas, saw what they -- and took what

they wanted from the revolutionary movement. okay? so, you know, how do you respond to a charge that you are moving in the direction of propaganda and elites manipulating the hapless or helpless masses? and so, you know, i am just curious about what you would say to that. and then i guess sort of related to that is -- this is your caveat to not call it race in the body of the book serves you well. because, as you know, there were many other others during the lead up to the revolution and during the revolution itself. catholics. and you know anti-catholicism was rampant in the north

american protestant british colonies prior to the revolution and was used as a motivator to get people riled up about british policies. you mentioned the germance. you say at one point, the germans weren't considered white. so that broadens our notion of who these others are pretty much in a way that could work if you're just talking about the use of this kind of fear during the war itself. but after the revolution in terms of talking about white supremacy and our more modern conception of racism, it poses some problems. which leads me to my last point, and you can take the easy way out here or the hard way out. on page 185 you say republicanism and exclusion are

inseparable. not only is white supremacy an ideology, it's intertwined with and dependent upon republicanism that was born in 1776. okay. so the easy way out is to say this is in the conclusion and it's kind of hyperbole and i was just stretching things. the harder thing is for you to justify it, which i'm interested in. i don't actually object to the idea that white supremacy is an ideology or that it was intertwined with republicanism. but is it dependent on republicanism? i know you're trying to explain that republicanism required the definition of citizenship. and that requires inclusions and exclusions. but does -- does founding a republic require exclusion? and if it requires exclusion, are you certain that

it's the exclusion of the same groups that you're identifying as the motivators or the unifying force for the american revolution? so i will stop there. just once again say i think it's a terrific book. i think it is an incredible teaching book. and i think it is a book that nonhistorians can learn a lot from and really has a lot to teach us in many, many ways about the present moment. >> thank you so much. robert, some thoughts. >> sure. yeah. so thank you for that rose marie. so three things to talk about. one, bernard bailin, two propaganda, three republicans. okay. so, yeah, i -- it took me -- i think i was at the page proofs

stage of "the common cause" in 2015 or whatever when i finally realized 15 years in that, oh, i remember driving in my car and thinking it dawned on me that really what i was doing was having this really big fight. between bailin and wood. i didn't realize i was doing that for 15 years. maybe that shows a little bit of his torrio graphic forgetting on my part. and i think my -- i do -- maybe it is because that bailin's book, which i admire very much, is -- it is very close to what -- some of the thing that i am saying. i just see the limitations of it in a couple of ways. i would also say to some of the argumentation that t.h. green makes as well. in that, first of all, one of the points that i make in the

larger book, but also in "thirteen clocks" is that once the shooting starts, all the stakes change. this is the artificial we teach these things to have a broader american revolution that we talk about that starts somewhere in 1763 and ends in 1780s. that's the american revolution. when i teach my era of the american revolution class, it's a 30-year thing or longer. but the revolutionary war is just a small part of that. and we like to bifurcate these things, but that's not how people at the time lived it. so the war itself, the idea that this is the packaged deal is in 1875 is where i part ways with bailin. but i do think that the arguments that i think do

ross nate with some colonists, not a few colonists, but some colonists, those are argumentations about masculinity, about honor, about identifying liberty and identifying conspiracy and making the right choice here. and those things are highlighted from the 18th century past, from the 17th century past, from the roman past, the idea of the virtual liberty loving masculine republicans will take action to defeat tyranny that is right in front of their face. and we can add potpourri to that, too. that argument, i think, does hold a lot of water. but then, as the stakes go up in 1776 '76, i think they have to go deeper than that.

i know that because that's what a lot of people start to talk about. the same guys who are writing pamphlets in 1774 about those topic don't really write about that stuff anymore. what they write about is it's almost like now the test has come. and they start talking about the test. and the test is the tyrant s who we thought were tyrants, now they are doing this. now you have to -- now it's very obvious what -- the tyranny has become naked and obvious right in front of your eyes. you have to take steps in that direction. and i think as the stakes go up and you have to broaden the base, it can't just be other elites that are also reading these pamphlets that look like you in other colonies. you have to broaden the base here and you have to get a lot of people to put their bodies

and their families and their fortunes on the line. that's going to require a different level of argumentation that i think goes past economic arguments. it goes past just sort of purely political, theoretical arguments. and now -- and where do we go after that? i think in the colonial imagination, you go to race. you go to those kinds of things. you open the tool box and those kinds of fears are laying right in the very top of the tool box. so i do think that my argument here -- again, i want to get to ideology here as well. now, propaganda. i have struggled with that word for a really long time. and it is certainly not -- when historians in the 1930s and '40s thought about propaganda, they were thinking about the

creole committee, and they were thinking about goebbels, and they were thinking about world wars, mass media totalitarian stuff. and so then when they thought about the american revolution, they said is this right? is this the same kind of manipulation, and as you said, right, the same kind of elites hoodwinking an unsuspecting people? and i think we are now -- i struggled with that myself. is that really what's going on here? and i thought about that word propaganda for a long time. over the course of many years of staring at the wall, i began to think about the base word propagate. and propagation, which is a very 18th century concept about growing your own things whether it's the society or the gospel or propagating crop yields, or

propagating families, or limiting the propagation of smallpox, that kind of thing. that's something that 18th century people are really familiar with. and that is what i think the patriot leaders are trying to do is propagate more patriots. they were trying to do their very best to get people to agree with them. and make the best arguments to get people to agree with them. and sometimes that worked and sometimes that really didn't work. and there's tremendous amount of agency. the robert gross. another line that's not taped to my monitor, but it's close to my head is what brought people to the concord bridge. and what brought people to the bridge? why were the minute men there to take a bullet? and everyone i think who was there would have a very different reason for that. but what i came back to over and over again was adams and jefferson and franklin and washington went back to the stories over and over again because they thought they would

resonate with people. they thought, this is something we should spend our time and money telling the american people about. because we only have a very small box here of arguments that will work. pause people disagree about what liberty means. and people disagree about whether or not we should have freedom of religion. i just finished a book about in north carolina the enlightenment ideas about religion aren't -- people are very unhappy about that. so they think that the revolutionary leaders in north carolina in 1777 are secret catholics and this is a popish thing because they are saying that they don't really believe in the trinity. so there's plot to try to kill patriot leaders. and those guys consider themselves patriots.

so the window of how you make this argument is a very small one. so how do you sort of thread that needle over and over again. i think race is really a safe argument. as opposed to other ones. and page 185. i'm glad you think that white supremacy is an ideology. that's good. because i -- i agree. maybe if i were to change that sentence what i would should say is republican in the # form that it takes and found in in the united states in 1776 needed white supremacy. i'm not saying that republicanism across the board in every age does. although, maybe exclusion is an important part, especially if you are going to throwa out a lot -- if you are going to pull up a lot of different anchors, like you're going enfranchise a lot of

people. you have to figure out how to exclude people. because not everybody is going to be happy with bringing everybody in. that's not historically what -- you know, we think about the american -- the uniformism of 1776 and 1789 leads to a backlash of exclusion by the teens and 20s all over the world. nationalism does change shape in the 19th century as a backlash against that, which know very well. so i think in the republicanism in the form that it takes in the united states, it's dependent on that. i think it needs that to make it a coherent project. >> thank you very much. we're now going to our audience and the questions they posed. i have very basic one here that

we can start off with. that you actually address in i think paragraph one of your preface, but i'll let you answer here. david stork writes, please clear up some confusion for me. i just ordered a copy of "the common cause." now i get the impression that "12 clocks" is a distillation. of the common cause for college classes. did i order the wrong book? >> no, david, i don't think you ordered the wrong book. but i -- so, "the common cause" is something that stretches over a longer period of time. it goes into the 1780s, but then it really goes into the 1810s. and this book focuses just on a couple of the different chapters. and really, that's those 15 months between april of '75 and july of '76. it is -- it is -- i call it an abridgment sort of because there's a lot of new

writing in it and there's something -- believe it or not, in the 700 page book there is a paragraph that i turn into a chapter about all the very different ways in which you know, not only the colonies disagreeing with one another and fighting with one another, that's getting worse in the 1770s, that all of these problems are getting far more exacerbated. the pennsylvania and virginia are on the brink of war with one another over the ohio river country. and connecticut and pennsylvania are at war with one another over the wyoming valley. and new york and new hampshire are fighting with one another over the vermont country. this is all happening in the 1770s. sometimes within months of the fighting in lexington and concorde. so then there's slavery and the loyalists are actually making really good points.

so those are kind of things that i highlight much more in "thirteen clocks" to give you the stakes here about how difficult an enterprise as adam says, this really was. >> thank you. we have a number of questions that center on the question of fear. and sarah cunningham asks, who 's ---est whose interests does the fear serve, who writes and promotes these inflammatory pieces. she's thinking granularly, and alan asks, did scare tactics create fear or more importantly confirm existing fears and biases? and finally, paul asks, there seems to be an implication in the accounts of how the founders exploited fear of the other. is this an oversimplified observation or an indicator of how well this appeal has succeeded throughout american

history? u.s. history? was it indonesia merely a comment on the universal appeal of well-positioned propaganda? >> so who does it serve? i do think -- and who is benefitting the most at a granular level? so the john adams that's kind of side-eyeing us, right, this 40-year-old john adams, that portrait is done in the 1760s. in 1769, john adams -- things are going very badly in boston for the patriot cause this is before the boston massacre and things are not going well. there are competitors, print competitors, loyalist newspapers, who are threatening the sam adams and john adams

and john hancocks with calling them hypocrites, saying that the patriots are breaking the boycott. so it's a very precarious moment for the revolution in boston. so the adams cousins and james otis go to the print shop of the boston gazette. and adams writes about this in his diary. he said we had a wonderful night. we cooked up all kinds of things to put in tomorrow's newspaper. we cooked up occurrences and paragraphs and all kinds of fun stuff. and he says, it's working the political engine. quote, up -- quote, unquote, it's working the political engine. it's my favorite thing other than my daughters in the whole world, this paragraph, this one moment john adams tells us a big thing about how the revolution comes about. and so if you look at the next day's boston gazette, september

4th, 1779, you would have no way of knowing what was cooked up and what was not. and what are the things that are cooked up is kind of difficult to know. there are letters in there, some petrie in there. that's obviously cooked up. but there is stuff that n the term of the day, would be considered fake news. en in that boston gazette issues goes all over the place. it goes all throughout new england. it goes into new york. it doesn't go deep into the south after that, but it gets exchanged and taken directly. so the work that john adams and and sam adams are doing, that sunday night in the print shop goes all over the place. and i think they really do figure out that this is a really important ingredient to revolutionary mobilization. so john adams, later on after that, when he's in philadelphia, he will write letters back home and say put this in the newspaper. this paragraph, not this

paragraph. don't give this one to the printer. give that one to the printer. and those will appear in boston newspapers under the anonymous headline of "from a gentleman in philadelphia to his friend in boston." . and you have no way of knowing that's john adams writing to another patriot leader. we begin to see kind the architecture of these things. and how they get put into different -- you talk about propaganda. so there's a management to this whole thing. that there are no reporters or journalists in the 18th century. the only way in which they appear in the newspaper is if someone like adams gives their correspondence to the printer or if there is letters printed from -- you know, that come across the ocean or they are taken from someone else's newspaper, exchange newspapers. there is a directness to this.

it's not accidental and it's not. and it is not sort of pell mell. so i think that's an important part. did i get to every point of that? or is there more to the question that i missed? >> i suspect you could probably go on for the next two hours talking about fear, but i think that hit some of the highlights. >> fear. yeah, the fear stuff. yeah. yeah. >> so let me combine two other questions. the first just came in from martha, who asks, bernard bailin wrote this the 1960st, what do you think if you are still here? you would think of the direction that you have taken. and jen joshua kaufman a bit earlier wrote a question they suspect many people are thinking about. it's a very simple question. does your research align or conflict with the propositions taken in the 1619 project. >> right. i figured this would come up.

so i don't think -- well, there was a -- in 2017, there was a so i don't think in 2017 there was a anniversary conference about the 50th anniversary of the origins. and some proceedings some of those papers were published in the new england quarterly a few year or so after that. and so i actually could tell you some of the talk about my first book a common cause appeared in some of that. and some of the students mainly gordon wood weren't real big fans to have -- fans of it. mostly because it moves away from this idea of natural rights the more heroic interpretation of revolution. and it gets into sort of the -- for me, what's important is not the why. it is the how. and adams and jefferson and

franklin are & these guys are going to have regrets about what they do in the revolution afterwards. they are going to talk afterwards. what i think adams doesn't want us -- he doesn't want us to do the work that i was working on. he wants us to really think about those anvils and those pamphlets. he doesn't want us to think -- don't look behind the curtain about this after 1775. please focus on this really sort of heroic period when it's about pamphlets and rights. don't think about what we talk about when it comes to scaring people about slavery afterwards. so i think that that -- the historians who really believe that adams' interpretation is the right one don't love necessarily what i am saying here. what was the second part of the question, eric? >> 1619. >> 1619.

there we go. so you would think i would be a 100% wholesale supporter of 1619. and i'm not going to put a number on it, but i am a supporter of the larger project. for sure. we should think race is at the heart of the founding. that's the main point that is the takeaway from "thirteen clocks." and as i said before, that people you would not expect to be thinking about people of color at the moment that they are creating -- they are writing constitutions and writing declarations of independence, they are thinking about people all the time. those are not inseparable stories, as i said early on. when it comes to that very, very controversial line in the original 1619 project by nicole henna jones that slavery was the main driver of the revolution

she was talking about causes. what caused the revolution. "thirteen clocks" is not about causes. it's about what happens after. and slavery on april 18th, 1775 is something that people are talking a lot about. and some people are talking about seeing this opportunity of a crisis in the empire as a way to get rid of slavery. and some people are talking about it as a way to protect slavery. it's one of those controversial things. you have people at the first continental congress who are -- who are -- include the slave trade as part of the continental association boycott. they want to eliminate slavery. jefferson writes in some review of the rights of british americans that makes him famous as a writer, he says in 1773 and 1774, the quote, unquote, great object of desire is to eliminate slavery from the american colonies.

which was foisted upon us by the king. and we never wanted slavery. it is a clunky argument that he makes about that. but the great object of desire, this is a popular thing to get rid of slavery. then there are people who are also there from south carolina who are saying, get rid of slavery? what are you talking about? we want to double down and triple down on slavery. and so it is one of those fault lines that could destroy everything. what's interesting to me is starting the next day, that really changes. when the war begins, you don't see that kind of -- there are the pamphlets talking about using the crisis in the empire as way to get rid of slavery. the volume gets turned down to almost zero while the volume gets turned up dramatically about -- and now the british are trying their best to use

enslaved people to try to end the rebellion, to stop this. we see that in the declaration itself. jefferson writes a very beautiful paragraph about that -- that -- the language here, derrick, talk about what could have been used in the 1830s by abolitionists, by americans in the # 1830s, he calls the slave trade a pie ranical form of warfare. he talks about slavery is an assembly of horrors. he has this very powerful words. and his rough draft, they are capitalized. he means for them to be there. and they all get struck out by the congress except for the bit at the end of that paragraph when he says now they are using enslaved people against us. that bit stays.

so the great object of desire gets struck out completely. the merciless -- i mean, the dome nick stick insurrectionist part, then they are using them against us, that stays. so slavery becomes something that's not controversial because they are only talking about one part of the equation. and that to me, that part of it very much holds water of the 1619 argument that slavery is really important to this. that part holds water. as a cause, it's more difficult. as a consequence, you bet. >> thank you. so i get to exercise the co-chair prerogative to get my own question in. and at the very end of the book, you conclude, we have for too long taken adams and his colleagues at their word. you begin the book by taking apart what he said. what he wanted us to forget, and

we largely have, was that the # drive to have the clocks strike as one was also a campaign stamped by the vicious, the confining and the destructive. you pose a question about the word we in a different context in the book, but i want to know about this we. so who are the we that are not forgetting? >> what page are you on? what's that? 185. >> what page -- oh, 185 again. >> if you look at the historiography, yes, there are the celebratory accounts, but it's a long list or substantial list of people who are not doing precisely this. david wall striker is also blushed in the book. so there's a portion of at least the historical profession that addresses aspects of what you want and offer us a somewhat less romantic picture here. i assume that the we that you're talking about in this passage is

the american people. the broader culture here. but professional historians are often quite aware that what we write in our little academic studies doesn't always make it into the the larger public domain, at least not as much as we want it to. so talk about the we. if you would. who you want to know this stuff and how they might get to where you want them to be. >> oh, good. that was a very fantastically phrased thing. we came around to it. the we is the the american public. the we who we hold these truths to be self-evident we. so that's one of the things that one of the reasons i wanted to write this book. is because i feel like i get my cake and eat it too. i wrote this big long brick of a

book that only the omohundro institute could have published. every other publisher would have had words for me. and they did, too. but i got to make the entire argument and put all this evidence out there for graduate students and scholars. which is important. and that -- i do think that that -- we underestimate our importance a little bit when we think that people aren't going to find out about this. i think they do. i think it takes time, but i think that they do. but i then wanted -- i wrote this book very much for 19-year-olds. i had 19-year-olds in mind. this was part of the challenge here was to write it -- to work on the language, to work on the ways in which i made the arguments. the five sort of takeaways and

the conclusion are in bold for a reason to help teachers out there. i want them just to hit you on the head with these are the five things that are really important because i want the we to know these things. i want this to be something that as we head into the 250th anniversary, these kinds of arguments are part of the equation. if we're thinking about race as a central part of the founding as part of the cornerstone here, this is understanding the stakes. if we thought we could get rid of racism by passing a few laws in the 1960s, the reason it didn't work is because we didn't understand the depths of the problem. this kind of work is trying to get at the depths of the problem. we need to go much, much, much

deeper into the crusts and the mantle of north america to understand how race is penetrated. and this is -- what i think -- if you grow up with these things, i think this is also about climate change. our children are going to learn this at a young age. that might be different. that we might be different in a generation or so. >> if i could jump in. this is why i pushed against your other statement about republicanism and exclusion being linked. i would say they are contingently linked. and i think it's really important for the future of our -- >> yeah. >> -- society and government that we understand that choices were made, which your book shows. >> right. >> contingently, that excluded certain groups and we can make decisions to include other groups.

and of course, we fail over and over again, but that first part of the declaration of independence you know, calls us to equality and equal rights. and so, you know -- i mean, i think it is part of the his torrio graphical cycle to emphasize one theme over the other. but i really think it's important to at the same time that we emphasize the centrality of race, that we not lose the sense of hope and possibility for future inclusions that republican government and the principles of the declaration of independence hold out to us. >> i would completely agree with that. i don't mean for that to mean that we are then damned because of this. i do think that the contingency part of this does give us hope. it doesn't have -- we aren't bound because of what has

happened before. yeah. >> eric, you are muted. >> i just caught that. thank you. we have done 60 sessions -- over 60 sessions, and that was the first time -- first time that i had my mute on when i started to talk. my apologies. what i was saying is we could go on for quite some time. we scratched the surface of i think a very rich provocative and important book. but unfortunately, time is up. it is 5:30. and i have to draw this to a close. i want to thank our participants as well as members in the audience. our thanks to the institute for both bringing this book out and for cosponsoring this session. so thank you. robert, derrick, rose marie, and cathy. now available for preorder in the c-span schott shop,

c-span's 2022 congressional directory. go there today to order a copy. this compact spiral-bound book is your guide to the federal government with contact information for every meg member of congress including bios and committee assign mmts, also contact information for state governorsors and the biden administration cabinet. order your copy today. every c-span shop purchase helps support c-span's non-profit operation. welcome, everyone, to atlanta history center's virtual author talk series. my name is claire hailey, i'm the vice president of public relations and program here's at atlanta history center. it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's very special author talk featuring mary francis early. now if you don't yet have your copy of her newest book, you can get that from the museum store. you can get it on our campus or you can buy it online with options for domestic u.s.