Fighting Words in the American Revolution, 1763-87

A virtual fellow's forum with Nicolas Bell-Romero, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry at the University of Cambridge from January 27, 2022. Recording available. 

“Patriot,” “American,” “whig,” “Long Knife,” and “loyalist.” These words need little introduction. They were just a handful of the many epithets that contemporaries – women and men, Black, indigenous, and white – used in letters, pamphlets, newspapers, objects, and popular protests to define a person’s qualities or attributes in the Revolutionary era. Despite their importance, early Americanists have not afforded sufficient attention to the politics of naming. Why did people use these labels? How did their definitions change, and why? And what do these words suggest about that struggle? By examining seven case studies when names came under scrutiny, Fighting Words argues that in the second half of the eighteenth-century, people challenged the labels and titles that they had grown accustomed to for more than a century. Necessity, for many, was the mother of reinvention.Through their efforts to make and remake these labels to influence and navigate more than twenty years of dramatic political and social upheaval, these inhabitants ensured that the age of revolutions was also an age of reinvention, a moment when individuals, forced to choose sides or compel others to accept their point of view, created new personages to define friends from enemies, build bonds of belonging between likeminded persons and communities, and attain recognition for their services and sacrifices. It was an era when people turned words upside down, and through their creative understandings and, importantly, misunderstandings of each other forged new meanings and cultural practices that persisted beyond the Revolution.