The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America - A talk by Barbara Clark Smith March 22, 2011

Barbara Clark Smith will discuss her new book. The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America explores the political forms and social commitments that brought ordinary, middling American colonists into the resistance movement against Great Britain. Dr. Smith challenges received understandings of the nature and causes of the Revolution. Most boldly, she argues that many Patriots sought forms of “freedom” quite unfamiliar to Americans today.

Barbara Clark Smith received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1983. She has worked since then as curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, where she has produced path-breaking exhibitions. She researches political participation in colonial, Revolutionary, and early national America.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/