At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand
Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and
became refugees throughout the British Empire. This groundbreaking
book offers the first global history of the loyalist exodus to
Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, India, and beyond. Following
extraordinary journeys like the one of Elizabeth Johnston, a young
mother from Georgia, who led her growing family to Britain,
Jamaica, and Canada, questing for a home; black loyalists such as
David George, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and went on to
found Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and
Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant, who tried to find autonomy for
his people in Ontario, Liberty’s Exiles challenges
conventional understandings about the founding of the United States
and the shaping of the postrevolutionary world. Based on original
research on four continents, this book is at once an intimate
narrative history and a provocative new analysis—a story about the
past that helps us think about migration, tolerance, and liberty in
the world today.
關於作者:
Maya Jasanoff was educated at Harvard,
Cambridge, and Yale, and is currently an associate professor of
history at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire:
Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, was
awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year
selection in numerous publications including The Economist, The
Guardian, and The Sunday Times London. She has
recently been a fellow of the New York Public Library, the Library
of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has
contributed essays to the London Review of Books, The New York
Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books.