Revolutionary Networks

Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens.

During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks, Joseph M. Adelman argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Going into the printing offices of colonial America to explore how these documents were produced, Adelman shows how printers balanced their own political beliefs and interests alongside the commercial interests of their businesses, the customs of the printing trade, and the prevailing mood of their communities. Adelman describes how these laborers repackaged oral and manuscript compositions into printed works through which political news and opinion circulated. Drawing on a database of 756 printers active during the Revolutionary era, along with a rich collection of archival and printed sources, Adelman surveys printers' editorial strategies. Moving chronologically through the era of the American Revolution and to the war's aftermath, he details the development of the networks of printers and explains how they contributed to the process of creating first a revolution and then the new nation. By underscoring the important and intertwined roles of commercial and political interests in the development of revolutionary rhetoric, this book essentially reframes our understanding of the American Revolution. Printers, Adelman argues, played a major role as mediators who determined what rhetoric to amplify and where to circulate it. Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens.

The story of the Culper Ring wasn’t always as well-known as it is now, which was due to much of the information about it being classified for a long time. It wasn’t until the 20th century that the public gained insight into the existence and activities of this spy network. Since then, the Culper Ring has been the object of scholarly study and discussion, especially in the US. In time, we’ve learned about the ring’s founders, the context of its emergence, its key operatives, methods, and successes. This is a story that weaves its way through a relatively short but decisive period in American history. Behind the main events and the history that everyone is familiar with, the story of the Culper Ring is like a seldom-told chapter that serves as an important piece of the puzzle, regardless of how it might often be overlooked. That is, however, the story that this book will recount in a concise manner so that you can remind yourself of the revolutionary heroes that went unsung for a long time.

Tracing local trajectories of conflict, Mazur explains how the Syrian uprising became a civil war fought largely along ethnic lines.

On March 15th, 44 BC a group of senators stabbed Julius Caesar, the dictator of Rome. By his death, they hoped to restore Rome's Republic. Instead, they unleashed a revolution. By December of that year, Rome was plunged into a violent civil war. Three men--Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian--emerged as leaders of the revolutionary regime, which crushed all opposition over the next decade. In time, Lepidus was removed, Antony and Cleopatra were dispatched, and Octavian stood alone as sole ruler of Rome. He became Augustus, Rome's first emperor, and by the time of his death in AD 14 the 500-year-old republic was but a distant memory and one of history's greatest empires had been born. Rome's Revolution provides a riveting narrative history of this tumultuous period of change. In addition to chronicling the drama of aristocratic rivalries, author Richard Alston digs beneath the high politics of Cicero, Caesar, Antony, and Octavian to reveal the experience of the common Roman citizen and soldier. Portraying the revolution as the crisis of a violent society--both among the citizenry and among a ruling class whose legitimacy was dwindling--Rome's Revolution provides new insight into the motivations that drove men to march on their capital city and slaughter their compatriots. An enthralling story of violent politics, social upheaval, and personal betrayal, Rome's Revolution is a brilliant new history of an epoch which still haunts us today.

With American leadership facing increased competition from China and India, the question of how hegemons emerge—and are able to create conditions for lasting stability—is of utmost importance in international relations. The generally accepted wisdom is that liberal superpowers, with economies based on capitalist principles, are best able to develop systems conducive to the health of the global economy. In Birth of Hegemony, Andrew C. Sobel draws attention to the critical role played by finance in the emergence of these liberal hegemons. He argues that a hegemon must have both the capacity and the willingness to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of providing key collective goods that are the basis of international cooperation and exchange. Through this, the hegemon helps maintain stability and limits the risk to productive international interactions. However, prudent planning can account for only part of a hegemon’s ability to provide public goods, while some of the necessary conditions must be developed simply through the processes of economic growth and political development. Sobel supports these claims by examining the economic trajectories that led to the successive leadership of the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Stability in international affairs has long been a topic of great interest to our understanding of global politics, and Sobel’s nuanced and theoretically sophisticated account sets the stage for a consideration of recent developments affecting the United States.

A major reassessment of the rise and global impact of revolutionary Third World radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s.

List of illustrations -- List of tables -- Preface -- Introduction: revolution and the city -- A spatial theory of revolution -- The growth and urbanization of revolution -- The urban civic revolutionary moment -- The repression-disruption trade-off and the shifting odds of success -- Revolutionary contingency and the city -- Public space and urban revolution -- The individual and collective action in urban civic revolution -- The pacification of revolution -- The evolving impact of revolution -- The city and the future of revolution -- Appendix 1. construction of cross-national data on revolutionary episodes -- Appendix 2. revolutionary episodes, 1900-2014 -- Appendix 3. data sources used in statistical analyses -- Appendix 4. choices of statistical models.