Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

From the Sons of Liberty to British reformers, Irish patriots, French Jacobins, Haitian revolutionaries and American Democrats, the greatest social movements of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions grew as part of a common, interrelated pattern. In this new transnational history, Micah Alpaugh demonstrates the connections between the most prominent causes of the era, as they drew upon each other's models to seek unprecedented changes in government. As Friends of Freedom, activists shared ideas and strategies internationally, creating a chain of broad-based campaigns that mobilized the American Revolution, British Parliamentary Reform, Irish nationalism, movements for religious freedom, abolitionism, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and American party politics. Rather than a series of distinct national histories, Alpaugh shows how these movements jointly responded to the Atlantic trends of their era to create a new way to alter or overthrow governments: mobilizing massive social movements. ‘… a bold and wide-ranging thesis … does much more than offer parallel histories of the radical movements that swept through large parts of the Atlantic world in the later eighteenth century. It moves seamlessly from the demands of the American Sons of Liberty in the 1760s to the campaigns of the United Irishmen, the movement for parliamentary reform in Britain, the role of popular societies in the French Revolution, antislavery campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France, and popular organization during the revolution in Saint-Domingue.’ Alan Forrest, Journal of Modern History Demonstrates how the activists who mobilized the Age of Atlantic Revolutions' greatest social movements worked together across nations. Micah Alpaugh is Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. His previous publications include Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787-1795 (2015), The French Revolution: A History in Documents (2021), and articles in European History Quarterly, Journal of Social History, and French Historical Studies.