American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
In this hybrid program, historian and author Richard Bell leads the audience on a riveting journey to rediscover the American Revolution as a world war that unleashed chaos, opportunity, and transformation across six continents. From the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore, from refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America’s own. It was a seismic global event that redrew maps, toppled hierarchies, catalyzed migration, and accelerated new movements for liberty—and for empire.
Drawing on his new book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (2025), Bell traces the far-flung reverberations of the war through the lives of the people it displaced, empowered, or destroyed. Attendees will encounter a Native matriarch struggling to preserve a transatlantic military alliance, a Prussian officer reinventing himself in a foreign army, and a Boston schoolteacher shipwrecked thousands of miles from home. Along the way, Bell explores how the Revolution stirred a transoceanic refugee crisis, ignited antislavery activism, and inspired uprisings from Ireland to India. He offers a bold new framework for understanding the Revolutionary War—not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawling, high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea, shaped by commerce, diplomacy, propaganda, and contingency. This is the American Revolution as you’ve never seen it before: complex, global, and astonishingly relevant to the modern world.
Richard Bell is professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of the book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His new book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, was published by Penguin in November 2025. Bell has held the following fellowships at AAS: Stephen Botein Fellowship, 2003-4; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2007-8; Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship 2012-13; and Legacy Fellowship, 2022-23