“The Call to Liberty: Echoes Heard Around the Atlantic World”
Calls to revolution echoed over four continents and countless islands in the decades following the American War for Independence. Revolutionaries on at least four continents denounced despotic rule and proclaimed their freedom. They were convinced that anything was possible as empires on both sides of the ocean unraveled and monarchs were toppled. At the end of Common Sense, Thomas Paine notably asserts, “We have it in our power to begin the world again.”
Historian Dr. Janet Polasky leads an exploration of this time, when the possibility of insurrection loomed on plantations carved out of Caribbean islands by enslaved labor, in the novels of Dutch housewives raising their children on manuals inspired by John Locke, and among the slave-trolling entrepreneurs of West Africa.
What ideas traveled outward from the American Revolution to inspire the foundations of republics across the seas? Did they together change the world as they knew it? Do we still share the ideals that echoed across the Atlantic 250 years ago?

A discussion of Sen. Alexander’s new memoir, “The Education of a Senator”