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The article focuses on committees of correspondence, groups formed roughly a decade previous to the American Revolution that used intercolonial communication to create newspaper articles, town halls, and street literature to spread their radicalized feeling against the British and to foster revolutionary support among those living in the colonies. This move was in protest to taxes and levies enacted after the French Indian War in which Great Britain attempted to recoup it's war expenses by the people in colonial America.

An afterword is presented to this special issue entitled "Writing To and From the Revolution," published in conjunction between the "Journal of the Early Republic" and the "William and Mary Quarterly" to explore how the American Revolution is approached by historians as either the culmination of the colonial period or as the beginning of the early republic.

An introduction is presented to this special issue entitled "Writing To and From the Revolution," published in conjunction between the "Journal of the Early Republic" and the "William and Mary Quarterly to explore how the American Revolution is approached by historians as either the culmination of colonial period or as the beginning of the early republic.

Building social tables in the tradition of Gregory King, we develop new estimates suggesting that between 1774 and 1800 American incomes fell in real per capita terms. The colonial South was richer than the North at the start, but was already beginning to lose its income lead by 1800. We also find that free American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales. The colonists had greater purchasing power than their English counterparts over all of the income ranks except in the top percent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay that offers an economic interpretation of the American independence movement and American Revolutionary War is presented. It comments on taxation, slavery, and trade. The authors consider arguments set forth in various British pamphlets. They also examine the First Continental Congress, the Second Continental Congress, and the views of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, especially those set forth in his pamphlet "A Summary View of the Rights of British America."

Between 1690 and the end of the American Revolution, colonial newspaper printers developed a fairly standardized writing style in trying to provide readers useful, informative, and entertaining news in as little space as possible. A long history of newsletters, government publications, English newspapers, apprenticeships, and news clipping, as well as shortages of supplies and a fear of censorship, helped shape this style. Printers recognized that readers wanted to know at minimum the basic information--who, what, when, where, why, and how--of a news story, and when space permitted, a few longer pieces, usually written in chronological order, included more details, background information, and dramatic introductory sentences. Overall, however, writers based their newswriting on fundamental storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English people were fascinated, disgusted, and frightened by the new American habit of tarring and feathering officials. Eighteenth-century England experienced more riots than America, but English rioters never sought to change the status of upper-class targets with theatrical disfigurements. Polite English folk feared the spread of tar and feathering to England’s underclass and, thus, became convinced that Americans had to be violently transformed or allowed to leave the Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the book "Histoire philosophique at politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes," written by a group 18th century French historians and philosophers but primarily attributed to Guillaume-Thomas-Francois Raynal and Denis Diderot, first published in 1770, and revised and expanded in 1780. The book was considered the leading examination of European colonization in the Western and Eastern Hemispheres of its time. The influence of the book on French opinion towards the colonies which went on to form the United States and of the Revolutionary War is considered. The sections of the book dealing with the U.S. and its colonial history were an exception to its general theme of the barbarity of European imperialism elsewhere.

This article presents an examination of deism in the U.S. in the years following the the American Revolution. The author relates the story of merchant and deist William Beadle who murdered his wife and children in 1782 and the reaction this crime had on public opinion towards deism in the U.S. The author explores how deism challenged Americans' religious views and the role deism played in shaping American religious common sense. The author discusses the religious atmosphere of the U.S. in the years following the Revolutionary War and the popularity that Christianity and Evangelicalism experienced during those years.

Traces the legislative activities of George Mason IV in behalf of religious liberty in revolutionary Virginia in the 1770s. Contributions to the drafting of Article XVI of the Virginia Declaration of Rights; Initiatives raised in late 1776 and 1779; Involvement in the disestablishment struggle of the mid-1780s.