Fireside Chat- Neutrality and Choosing Sides in the American Revolution

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Tuesday, December 9th at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

In this Fireside Chat, author Travis Glasson will discuss his new book Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2025). Neutrals – people who were neither ardent Patriots nor committed Loyalists – made up perhaps forty to sixty percent of the colonial population at the time of the American Revolution.  However, their experiences are usually glossed over in histories of the conflict.  Glasson’s work uses the experiences of the extended Cruger family, whose members included two mayors of New York City, a pro-American British MP, and the St. Croix merchant who gave Alexander Hamilton a start in life, to put neutrals’ stories at the center of a wider reconsideration of the Revolutionary conflict as a trans-Atlantic civil war.  In the process, it gives us new ways to think about how and why people made the Revolutionary-era political choices they did, what the conflict had in common with other civil wars across human history, and how the Revolution’s legacy has been defined by remembering some stories and forgetting others.

Travis Glasson is Associate Professor of History at Temple University and an Affiliated Faculty member with Temple’s Global Studies Program.  He completed his BA at the College of the Holy Cross and his MA and PhD at Columbia University.  Glasson’s other publications include the book Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2011) and articles published in venues including the William and Mary Quarterly and The Journal of British Studies.  

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society