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Author Talk with Abby Chandler on Zoom

Seized with the Temper of the Times

Join us for a virtual author talk with Abby Chandler who will share with us about her new book, Seized with the Temper of the Times: Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America.

Seized with the Temper of the Times is a reexamination of the Stamp Act riots in Rhode Island and the Regulator Rebellion in North Carolina. Local author and historian Abby Chandler will discuss her book, focusing on the Howard family and the role of Martin Howard in both historical events.

This book explores, as never before, the complex local and transatlantic tensions which infused the early imperial crisis. “Our personal rights, comprehending those of life, liberty, and estate is every subject’s birthright, whether born in Great Britain or in the colonies” wrote Rhode Island lawyer and politician Martin Howard in a pamphlet defending the Stamp Act. Howard’s opponents drew on a similar fusion of Anglo-American common law and political tradition to voice their own arguments against Parliamentary taxation. Still, such commonalities were not enough to save Howard during Newport’s Stamp Act riots when a mob destroyed his home and forced him to flee to London. Howard was later appointed North Carolina’s Chief Justice, where he played an important role in another crisis, the Regulator Rebellion. By examining the Stamp Act crisis and the Regulator Rebellion through the eyes of the Howard family, this talk brings these movements to vivid life while telling a broader story about the evolution of American political thought in the decades surrounding the American Revolution.

Abby Chandler is Associate Professor of Early American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She has published articles on political movements in eighteenth-century British North America in Early American Studies, Protest in the Long Eighteenth Century, and the North Carolina Historical Review. She is also serves on the 250th American Revolution Anniversary Commission in Massachusetts.

This program will be recorded. A copy of the recording will be shared with those who register.

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