Join us, Thursday, March 27, 2025 at 4pm for a Fellow’s Forum by Donald Johnson, associate professor of history at North Dakota State University.
Held in the Berkeley Conference Room of the Jefferson Library, this Fellow’s Forum is free and open to the public. The Presentation will begin promptly at 4pm and last for 60 minutes, including an opportunity for Q&A and discussion.
About the Presentation
Over the spring and summer of 1775, revolutionary committees in small towns and rural communities took charge of the Revolutionary movement. In the chaos that followed the battles of Lexington and Concord, thousands of farmers, lawyers, ministers, shopkeepers, and artisans all over British North America reluctantly took up the reins of power in their communities, exercising emergency civil powers and establishing a rudimentary form of revolutionary government in place of the ousted colonial regimes. While provincial and Continental leaders debated over how best to proceed, local committeemen organized and equipped vast new revolutionary armies, collected taxes to fill revolutionary coffers, drove out enemies of the revolutionary movement, and dispensed revolutionary justice. Amidst the fear, outrage, and passion sparked by the outbreak of civil war, these unlikely revolutionaries stepped up not just to organize for war but also to maintain what semblance they could of due process, fairness, and legal procedure within their communities. By the end of 1775 the local committees had succeeded in establishing a fragile but effective revolutionary authority that supplanted imperial government in all but a few isolated pockets of the thirteen now-former colonies.
About Donald Johnson
Donald Johnson is a historian of early America and an associate professor at North Dakota State University. His work focuses on popular politics during the era of the American Revolution, with an emphasis on how the lived experiences of ordinary people shaped major events and vice versa. His first book, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Everyday Experience of Revolution, won the distinguished book award in US History from the Society for Military History and was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Prize in Military History. Johnson is currently working on a book manuscript chronicling the role of local revolutionary leaders during the first months of the Revolutionary War. He is currently a short-term fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and in the past has received fellowships from more than a dozen institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Huntington Library, and the American Philosophical Society. He earned a PhD in American History from Northwestern University, an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware, and a BA in History and Anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.