HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

In this episode, professor Patrick O’Brien of the University of Tampa will be examining the loyalist experience of our Revolutionary War, mostly from the perspectives of women and enslaved African Americans. From our vantage point 250 years later, it’s easy to view the War for Independence as a simple story of good and bad. The good patriots battled the bad British from Lexington to Yorktown, until we had a country to call our own. Look a little closer, however, and the story isn’t so simple. Many of the tens of thousands of loyalists who were eventually forced to flee the new United States had roots that went back a century and a half in this country, every bit as long as the patriots who drove them out. And, as Dr. O’Brien points out, many of those who left everything behind to start new lives in London or Halifax didn’t really have much say in the matter, as enslaved people, indigenous groups, and women were more or less forced to adopt the political positions of the white men in their lives. Dr. O’Brien will bring those stories to light by focusing on a few prominent Boston loyalist families.

This talk was delivered as part of Old North Illuminated’s Digital Speaker Series. Many thanks to ONI and Dr. O’Brien for sharing it with us.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/285/

Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/

This Perilous Hour of Trial, Horror & Distress

Dr. O’Brien is a historian of the American Revolution who studies British-sympathizing women and families, their experience as exiles in Nova Scotia and their return to the United States in the late 18th century. He is an associate teaching professor of history at the University of Tampa.

• Patrick O’brien; Duty and Love: Flora Lee’s Resistance to Slavery in Revolutionary Marblehead. The New England Quarterly
• O’Brien, G. P. . (2020). “Gilded Misery”: The Robie Women in Loyalist Exile and Repatriation, 1775–1790. Acadiensis
• The importance of the “Book of Negroes” in Nova Scotia history
• Loyalist songs
• Loyalist Migrations Project
• Primary sources and discussion topics on Loyalists via MHS
• Kacy Tillman, “What is a Female Loyalist,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life

Our header image this week is a detail from the background of Benjamin West’s 1812 portrait of John Eardly Wilmot