Eliga Gould’s scholarship focuses on the American Revolution, with an emphasis on the entangled history that Americans shared with the rest of the Americas, as well as with Africa, Europe, and the wider world. His current book project, CRUCIBLE OF PEACE (under contract with Oxford), examines the least studied of the United States’ founding documents: the Treaty of 1783 that ended the American Revolutionary War. In AMONG THE POWERS OF THE EARTH: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND THE MAKING OF A NEW WORLD EMPIRE (Harvard, 2012), he explored the manifold ways in which the early American republic’s quest to be accepted as a “treaty worthy” nation by Europe’s colonial powers shaped American thinking about an array of issues, including federalism, Native American treaty rights, and the abolition of slavery. The book has been widely praised, including on the WALL STREET JOURNAL's op-ed page and by Noam Chomsky, who highlighted the concept of treaty worthiness in an editorial on contemporary U.S. foreign policy. Named a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Among the Powers received the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. A Japanese translation was published in 2016.
