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Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026, at 12:00 PM EST

Please join us on June 23^rd at 12:00 pm EST for a Fireside Chat discussion with the authors and co-editors of Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic. (Penn Press, 2026)

Casey Schmitt will host a roundtable discussion with the editors and two authors in the new edited collection, Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic. (UPenn, 2026).  Co-editors Rachel Herrmann and Jessica Choppin Roney will be joined by authors Christian Koot and Samuel Truett to discuss this collaborative endeavor.  The authors in Claiming Land, Claiming Water investigate how and why some people imagined and made claims to bounded space—and how and why other people confounded or challenged those claims—through a formative period of intense change in North America and the Atlantic world (c. 1630–1860).

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Wednesday, July 8th, 2026, at 7 PM ET

American money and American democracy have always been in tension, pitting political equality against economic inequality. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution, Andrew David Edwards shows how this struggle emerged in America’s founding era. Everyone knows that the founders waged a revolt against taxation without representation. Edwards shows that the dispute over taxes was really a dispute over money: what it was, who could make it, and how to keep it from being used at the expense of the colonists in North America. The colonial rebels refocused their resistance on democratic, local control—defending the power they had used to make money for themselves.

Edwards’s narrative spans four continents, linking the problems of money and revolt in early America to the transatlantic slave trade, the disastrous mismanagement of the East India Company in India, and violence against Native Americans. His analysis emerges from the story itself, through the lives of individuals ranging from John Blackwell, Oliver Cromwell’s one-time war treasurer, to Thomas Paine, the impassioned pamphleteer of the American Revolution. Edwards argues that as the republican vision of an agrarian, independent monetary system faded, the leaders of the Revolution tied the nation to capitalism and imperialism at its founding. The colonists may have won the battle for representation, but the money that underpinned the European empire had established a stronghold in the new republic. Money and the Making of the American Revolution offers both an ambitious new interpretation of the Revolution and a fascinating story about the power of economic ideas.

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Tuesday, June 21st, 2026, at 5:30 PM EST

Please join us on the evening of July 21st for a book talk with Greg O’Malley, author of The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)

The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2026) presents a life history of a man, born enslaved in colonial Virginia, whose repeated escape attempts triggered a remarkable saga. He survived enslavement on Virginia and Carolina plantations, stints in hiding in backcountry Carolina settlements, captivity in Native American communities, and evacuation from the emerging United States (and emancipation) with the British Army during the Revolution. Along the way, he founded arguably the first Black Baptist congregation in what became the United States. His surviving narrative, though brief, is the earliest known firsthand account of an attempt to escape slavery in North America. Because his struggle against enslavement spanned the revolutionary era, his story offers a counterweight to the litany of biographies of white “founding fathers.” Instead of a fight for political freedom from Britain and monarchy, George’s life reveals a parallel quest for freedom from American slavery. To achieve his independence, George fled the United States in the moment of its creation.