Welcome to the Class Site for the University of Arkansas’ Hist 3603!

As the title suggests, this is a class project where we endeavor to explore Gary Nash’s concept of the American Revolution as a “multiplicity of revolutions.”¹ Throughout the semester, our class explored the social, political, and economic history of the American colonies, from before their inception to the pivotal rupturing of the British Empire that resulted in American independence. More importantly, though, we also examined how concepts of gender, race, class, as well as notions of identity and agency changed over space and time during this period. We did this by discussing major cultural, economic, political, and social changes, like Bacon’s Rebellion, and we explored how colonists both dealt with the consequences of these changes and chose to remember them. As we moved into the revolutionary period, our class examined how the traditional social mores cemented during the colonial period evolved once again as the revolutionary movement took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a military conflict for independence, but a social, political, and economic movement, one that was as individualized as it was a movement for “the people.” That is what this course site is about. We endeavor you to explore the products of our hard labor, both individually as students and collaboratively as a class, to highlight the importance of learning about the role of gender, race, class, identity, and agency, in the American Revolution.

As you click each button below and explore how some women, Native Americans, and African Americans understood and engaged with the revolution, we beseech you to consider the question: “Whose Revolution Was It?”²

¹ Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. Viking: New York, 2005. xiv-xv.
² Alfred Young and Gregory Nobles, Whose Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding. New York University Press: New York, 2011.