All major combatants of the American Revolutionary War (1776-1783) deployed privateers to disrupt shipping in the Atlantic Ocean. American privateers uniquely experienced the war as they broke the British blockade of North America, raided British territory, and disrupted international trade. American privateers are often depicted as legalized pirates or profiteers. How- ever, the reality of privateering is much more complex. This article analyzes primary sources, including memoirs, correspondence, and secondary historio- graphical texts to explore how privateers have been misrepresented in history. These sources reveal a legally and personally complicated affair that does not align with existing understandings of the topic. This article posits that previ- ous understandings of privateering, featured in select primary and secondary sources, are inaccurate and deny historians valuable information. This article seeks to recover privateers’ place in the broader history of the American Rev- olution and allow for an integration of their experiences in future historiogra- phy by uncovering their muddled history.

At the time of the American Revolution, French culture developed a fas- cination with America. This trend was expressed in many forms, including fashion, artwork, and architecture, all con-tributing to French narratives about the United States and the American Revolution. The fore-most of these nar- ratives were the portrayals of America as a neoclassical, republican idyll and as a rustic, pastoral return to the romantic concept of nature. French figures who donned the “American” style played a large and often conscious role in crafting such cultural narratives. From 1776 to 1789, the “American” style in France took on a variety of contradictory meanings in French culture and politics. French figures like the Marquis de Lafayette, the Duchesse de la Tour du Pin, and the Marquis de Condorcet took on a French-American identity and styled themselves as “Americans” to express different political views.

By analyzing these individuals’ political views and sartorial styling, this essay examines the impact of French “American” style on the French perception of America. The essay utilizes contemporary publications such as newspa- pers and fashion magazines, as well as the memoirs and correspondence of French fig-ures. Through these sources, I examine the narratives surrounding “American” style and identi-ty in France. This reveals the complex relation- ship between French style and politics, contrib-uting to the ongoing historical discourse on the cultural lead-up to the Revolution of 1789.

<&ldquo>"Connected Worlds: Communication Networks in the Colonial Southeast, 1513-1740" <&rdquo> is a study of the struggle to acquire and control information in a pre-postal, pre-printing press colonial world. This dissertation focuses on the period between 1513 and 1740 in the American Southeast. It argues that the acquisition and transmission of news was crucial to the creation, development and growth of colonial spaces. Secondly, this study examines the different groups and individuals who traversed and traded in the region, the routes that Spanish, English, French, Indian and African individuals followed and constructed, and the changing interpretations and values assigned to news.

The dissertation addresses a simple, yet often overlooked concern with how people in the colonial world came to know what they knew. The principal questions therefore explore both the practical as well as conceptual aspects of information. How was news acquired and transmitted in the colonial Southeast? What do these networks of communication reveal about the relations within and between the different groups that inhabited this geopolitical region? To answer these questions, the dissertation draws upon a wide range of sources, such as official dispatches, newspaper articles, personal reports, and other governmental records from Spanish, British, and North American archives.

Part I of the dissertation analyzes early definitions and understandings of news in the exploration and settlement of Florida. Part II turns to the practical aspects of information spread, providing an examination of Spanish networks of communication. Part III shifts the focus to the English, detailing how South Carolina used information networks to establish and define its authority in the region. And Part IV examines how changes to the economy, demography, and political structure of the Southeast in the 1730s altered the value and emphasis placed on news.

This dissertation explores the lives of Afro-Mexicans who lived in the Port-City of Veracruz and its hinterland, known as Sotavento (Leeward), during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period. It argues how Afro-Mexicans facilitated, complicated, and participated in multiple socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its Atlantic and inland borderlands. This dissertation’s interventions are twofold. First, Kin of the Leeward Port resituates Mexico’s socio-political, cultural, and economic networks with the Atlantic World and the Greater Caribbean; and second, it dissects and problematizes those networks by centering the Black and Afro-Mexican experience. Blacks and Afro-Mexicans shifted the late-colonial political landscape, inserted Mexico into nineteenth-century Atlantic revolutions, and altered the political texture of Veracruz and its connections to Mexican society and the larger Atlantic World. This dissertation centers Afro-Mexicans to do more than recover lives and stories often excluded from the Mexican national narrative; it seeks to reframe the larger history of liberal politics in nineteenth-century Mexico. It seeks to do so by tracing the long, intellectual, ideological, and political traditions of Afro-descendants in Veracruz and connects them to the Black Diaspora. Through vast primary source research, including notarial records, censuses, episcopal formal visitations, Inquisition files, cartography, trade records, travel accounts, and correspondence, both personal and military, this dissertation brings together traditionally distinct historiographical periods in the history of Mexico and Latin America. It also joins three very well-developed historiographical traditions that often overlap but seldomly intersect: Atlantic World History, African Diaspora History, and Latin American History. This dissertation interrogates and subverts archival silences that have sought to erase Black and Afro-Mexican agency from narratives of identity and nation-state formation, seeking to diversify these narratives by foregrounding the voices, perspectives, and actions of Afro-descendants.