Virginia’s Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in the Early Republic

This talk will focus on Prof. Taylor’s new research project on African Americans during the War of 1812 and their dispersal throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world, including Canada’s maritimes, the Caribbean, and Great Britain.
Taylor is much admired by colonial and Early National period US historians, and familiar to many of our grad students who have already encountered his works in HI 292A. He won the Bancroft (Best book in US history), Beveridge (AHA best book in Canadian, US or Latin American history), and Pulitzer Prizes for the 1996 _William Cooper’s Town_, about land speculators in upstate NY in the late 18th and early 19th c (Cooper was also father of James Fenimore Cooper).

Taylor is a major force in 18th and 19th c. North American history in a global context, and is a towering figure in borderlands/frontier history, as well as in the history of the early republic and westward expansion. His latest work on the War of 1812 (a reappraisal of that conflict, entitled _The Civil War of 1812: British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies_) has a foreign relations emphasis, as do several of his earlier works, which focus on relations across the border that would eventually be drawn between the US and Canada.

hm 2/21/13