Summary: American Loyalists

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Historians concerned with American Loyalists during the second half of the eighteenth century have produced two brands of scholarship that encompass the broad, disjointed Loyalist narrative. The first juxtaposes the Loyalists in America with the Patriot rebels within the framework of numerous burgeoning American movements increasingly bent on the separation of certain areas from the British Empire and the removal of their communities from the dominion of British Parliament and the Crown. This particular framework places Loyalists in a political environment characterized by various forms of separatism coupled with a decentralized network of rebel governments known as Committees of Correspondence. These Committees of Correspondence in charge …show more content…

Loyalist scholarship within Bailyn’s sphere focused primarily on Loyalist ideological cohesion—or lack thereof—in the colonies, their disruption of the Patriot narrative, as well as the exploits of Loyalists after their departure from the American colonies. Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World chronicles the exodus of Loyalists to Canada, the Caribbean, India, and other parts of the British Empire. Mary Beth Norton’s The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 discusses the short-lived optimism of American Loyalists exiled to England as they realize the stark differences between English and American societies and come to miss the American land from which they came, and in which many of them were born and raised. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson takes a look at the political maneuvering of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, as well as the challenges he faced during his time in

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