From 1775 to 1776: The American Revolution and the Embarrassing Right of Resistance

Hamilton Smith 205. In honor of the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, UNH Professor of History, Eliga Gould, one of the world's leading historians of the American Revolution, will talk on the history of 1776. Lecture description: In the United States, July 4 is Independence Day. By the time Congress published the Declaration, however, the American Revolution was more than a year old. Focusing on the “shot heard round the world” by Massachusetts minutemen on April 19, 1775, at Concord’s North Bridge, Professor Eliga Gould will discuss the complicated legacy of the revolution’s origin as an act of armed rebellion. From the moment the shot was fired, that rebellious origin was a source of embarrassment, an awkward fact to be managed and explained away. But for Americans of all races, classes, genders, and political dispositions, from white nationalists on the far right to anti-war protesters on the left, the minutemen’s example was — and remains — fundamental to what it means to be a citizen. Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and, during the 2026-27 academic year, the Robert Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at the Henry Huntington Library in San Marino, California. In 2025-26, he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford. He has written extensively on the American Revolution, emphasizing the entangled history that Americans shared with the rest of the Americas, as well as with Africa, Europe, and the wider world. His books include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (2000), winner of the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute, Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (2005), co-edited with Peter S. Onuf, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012), which won the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and the first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World (2021), co-edited with Paul Mapp and Carla Gardina Pestana. He has held long-term fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University, and the Fulbright-Hays Program to the United Kingdom. He is currently finishing a book, Peace and Independence, about the Anglo-American peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War.