A presentation by Eliga Gould, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and the 2022-23 Fritz and Claudine Kundrun Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello from February 16, 2023.
About the presentation:
With the Declaration of Independence, Congress began drafting the Articles of Confederation, which served as the union’s first constitution. The result was a loose federation or league of friendship, an “empire of love,” in which the thirteen states voluntarily agreed to pool their resources for the common good. Although that effort is generally remembered as a failure, the Confederation produced a host of important innovations, including, as Eliga Gould will suggest, the expansion of religious liberty, the first efforts to abolish slavery, and the Northwest Ordinance. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the Revolutionary War, led to a new round of treaty making in Indian country, while Congress and the states grappled with the legal status of overseas debtors and loyalists. Tempted as they sometimes were to go their separate ways, the Confederation forced Americans to find ways to live and work together, and to do so in peace and harmony. The legacy of those efforts, for good and for ill, is with us to this day.
It was meant to be a spectacle. And it was. But not in the way intended. In this episode of our In the Course of Human Events podcast, author and historian Eliga Gould tells the incredible story of Charles Willson Peale's Triumphal Arch, built to celebrate the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
About Professor Gould:
Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and the 2022-23 Fritz and Claudine Kundrun Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. His books include Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012), co-winner of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize, as well as a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. He is currently finishing Crucible of Peace, a global history of the least studied of the United States’ founding documents: the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.
