What Makes A Revolution?

From 1675 to 1680 rebellions broke out across North America: an attempted uprising by enslaved Africans in Barbados; a conflict between colonists (and also colonists against Indigenous peoples) in Virginia known as Bacon’s Rebellion; a Narragansett-led wave of battles in southern and coastal New England called Metacom’s or King Philip’s War; and a series of attacks blending religion and politics in New Mexico labeled the Pueblo Revolt.  These violent spasms shocked participants and witnesses alike, produced long-lasting consequences, and changed the ways that residents of these regions understood each other and the worlds they inhabited.  Taken together, did they constitute a revolution?  

Biography: 

Peter C. Mancall is Distinguished Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.  His books include Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (Yale, 2007); Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson—A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books, 2009); and The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Making of a New England (Yale, 2019).  His next book, Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680, which is volume one of the Oxford History of the United States, will be published on June 1 2026. He was the Harmsworth Professor at Oxford in the 2019-2020 academic year.

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