Richard Bell

In this book talk, award-winning historian Richard Bell reveals the full breadth and depth of America’s founding fight. The American Revolution was not only the colonies’ triumphant liberation from the rule of an overbearing England; it was also a cataclysm that pulled in participants from around the globe and threw the entire world order into chaos. Repositioning the Revolution at the center of an international web, Bell ranges as far afield as India, Africa, Central America, and Australia. As his lens widens, the “War of Independence” manifests itself as a sprawling struggle that upended the lives of millions of people on every continent and fundamentally transformed the way the world works, disrupting trade, restructuring penal systems, stirring famine, and creating the first global refugee crisis. Bell conveys the impact of these developments at home and abroad by grounding this story in the gripping stories of individuals—including women, minorities, and other disenfranchised people. The result is an unforgettable and unexpected new vista on American history that shifts everything we thought we knew about our creation story.

Join us for a talk with Dr. Richard Bell, the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, a new book that tells the incredible story of five boys whose courage forever changed the fight against slavery in America. Their ordeal shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black-market network of human traffickers who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

The Declaration of Independence is a peculiar thing. It’s a literary masterpiece that was written jointly by a committee of fifty people. And what is it exactly and who is it aimed at: the American people, or King George, or someone else? What did people at the time make of it? What did it change? Why does it matter? In this talk, we will tackle the fascinating origins, misunderstood purpose, and extraordinary global legacy of the Declaration of Independence.

Frederick Douglass was a visionary—a prophet who could see a better future that lay just beyond reach. His talents were nothing short of extraordinary and he put his exceptional gifts to use in the service of freedom, driving American slavery into the grave. In this talk, we’ll explore this many-sided man’s life, family, and career, and consider his impact upon our modern struggle to advance the cause of black freedom in the United States.

Franklin's genius is a puzzle. Here is a man with only two years of proper schooling who later received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews as well as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Physics. In this talk University of Maryland historian Richard Bell will examine many of Franklin's ideas to make life simpler, cheaper, and easier for himself and everyone else. It turns out that those ideas encompassed not only natural science and engineering, but also all sorts of public works, civic improvements, political trail-blazing, and fresh, new business ideas.

When Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense, died in June 1809 only a dozen people came to his funeral. This program examines Paine’s meteoric rise to celebrity status during the American Revolution and his equally dramatic fall from grace in the decades afterwards. Once lionized as our most relatable and revolutionary founding father, Tom Paine died a pariah, too radical and uncompromising for the cautious new country he had called into being.

Over the course of four years, enslaved people worked to turn the Civil War into a freedom war. Slowly but surely, they pushed President Abraham Lincoln and his commanders in the field toward embracing emancipation as a war aim and to compel them to take the giant steps forward needed to abolish slavery once and for all. On June 19, 1865, the federal government finally met that objective, declaring slavery dead across the country. This momentous event marked a new birth of freedom—an occasion we now commemorate as Juneteenth.

Signed in 1783, the Treaty of Paris was the formal agreement that ended the War for Independence and created the United States of America. University of Maryland historian Richard Bell argues that the Treaty of Paris was a triumph for US diplomacy that reset relations with Britain and set a new border with Spanish North America. Notably, however, the treaty also damaged the US-French alliance irreparably and left Natives, loyalists, and fugitives from American slavery to fend for themselves.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in human history. In all, more than 12 million African men, women, and children were kidnapped, enslaved and made to board European ships destined for the New World. However, this talk turns this history inside out, examining the huge varieties of African resistance to this 400-year-long nightmare first within Africa itself and then aboard those nightmare ships on their way across the Atlantic.

The Indian subcontinent had long been the target of British land grabs, and Indian rulers tried to use the distraction of American secession to push Britain out of Asia entirely. Consider Haidar Ali, the ruler of Mysore. By war’s end, Ali and his son Tipu Sultan had put Britain firmly on the backfoot, forcing King George to order an all-or-nothing troop surge to India—a dramatic Swing to the East in which the independence of the entire subcontinent hung in the balance.

The hard winter of 1777, when the Continental Army was camped at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, was a turning point in the Revolution, the moment when new drills and regulations turned a ragtag collection of ill-supplied amateurs into a professional fighting force capable of winning a war. This program tells this important story from the perspective of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, the Prussian immigrant with the unusual home life whom Washington tasked with achieving that critical transformation.

In the 1750s North America took center stage in the world’s first truly global war. In Europe and nearly everywhere else, this bitter contest among the great empires of Britain, France, and Spain is known as the Seven Years War (1756–1763). Here in the United States we call it the French and Indian War. Join University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell as he tracks the shifting fortunes of these several European forces, as well as their Native and colonial American allies, on American soil. We will examine the peace treaty that Britain and France finally signed in 1763 to bring this destructive war to an end and the peculiar legacy of American colonists’ involvement: how their participation reinforced a sense of themselves as essential partners in the British Empire, but also sowed the seeds of the imperial crisis that would culminate just 20 years later in American independence.

In 1775, the British Empire in the New World consisted not of thirteen colonies, but of almost thirty. The largest were on the mainland, but the most valuable were in the Caribbean and Jamaica was the ‘jewel in the Crown,’ a sugar-exporting factory that generated more wealth for Britons that most mainland colonies combined. In this lecture, historian Richard Bell explores how fearful imperial officials worked to split their empire in half, insulating the British West Indies from the contagion of revolution by any means possible.

Join University of Maryland historian Richard Bell for a deep dive into the darkest corners of the 1787 federal Constitution and its infamous Three-Fifths Clause. Far more insidious than is commonly understood, the Three-Fifths Clause wove slaveholder power into the fabric of each of all three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—shaping every aspect of federal policy regarding slavery for decades to come.

Benedict Arnold is the most famous turncoat in American history. He was a skilled officer in George Washington’s Continental Army who began secretly communicating with British intelligence agents, giving them insider information, and dramatically defecting to their side in return for a mountain of cash. Historian Richard Bell reconstructs the life and times of Benedict Arnold, the reasons for this treason, and the larger problems of betrayal and desertion that dogged the Continental Army throughout the war.

Seen through American eyes, the Revolution marks a triumphant moment. Through British eyes, it looked quite different. To the King, the war for independence was an affront, a temper tantrum by an ungrateful colonial rabble. But, as historian Richard Bell explains, beyond the palace and Parliament, British responses to the war were anything but monolithic. The country was bitterly divided as to what the war was about, how to win it, and whether it was worth it.

Men of Irish heritage played crucial roles in fighting the American Revolution, siding with the patriots against the British Army in overwhelming numbers. In this evening program, the English-born but American-trained historian Richard Bell explores the Revolution from the perspective of the Irish and their descendants in America. Drawing on the latest scholarship, Bell reconstructs the history of English and Irish antagonism, the role of Roman Catholic religious faith in decisions about loyalty and affiliation, and the political and economic impact of the American Revolution on Ireland itself.

By March 1770, the people of Boston had lived almost 18 months under British military occupation. The town was a powderkeg—and on Monday, March 5, it exploded. Shots rang out on King Street and when the smoke from soldiers’ muskets cleared, five local men lay dead and dying on the snowbound street. In this program, historian Richard Bell will draw on the latest scholarship to explore the Boston Massacre from all its many sides.

The Siege of Yorktown in October 1781 was a decisive win for George Washington’s Continental Army. Yet it was also a triumph for the unlikely wartime alliance forged between patriot revolutionaries and the French King Louis XVI. University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell explores the inside story of this essential alliance as it evolved from small-scale privateering and gun-running into a military partnership that achieved a stunning joint victory at the Yorktown, the climactic battle of the American Revolution.

Between 1779 and 1782, Spanish rangers from Texas herded 10,000 cows over 500 miles to Louisiana to help feed Spanish soldiers fighting the British in the American Revolutionary War. Spain had joined the war on the patriots’ side in 1779 and would spend the next four years contributing a deluge of fresh soldiers, sailors, ships, and cows to the war effort. University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell explores this hidden history of Spain’s participation in the American Revolution.

America has Hamilton-mania! Its crafty lyrics, hip-hop tunes, and bold story have even rejuvenated interest in the real lives and true histories that Hamilton: the Musical puts center stage. In this talk, we’ll explore what the show’s success tells us about the marriage of history and show-business. We’ll learn what this amazing musical gets right and gets wrong about Alexander Hamilton, the American Revolution, and the birth of the US—and why all that matters.

“So you’re the little lady who started this great war!” said President Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1862 when he finally met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the blockbuster antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Lincoln might just have well have been talking to and about Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on America’s underground Railroad. Both women’s extraordinary activism advanced the fight against slavery and edged this country closer to Civil War.

"Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry,” ordered John Brown one October night in 1859. The ferry was Harpers Ferry, home to the largest arsenal of rifles in the United States. Brown hoped to capture Harpers Ferry and arm a nationwide slave revolt. But it all went wrong almost immediately and Brown was hanged having failed to free a single slave. Why, then, University of Maryland historian Richard Bell asks, was John Brown’s raid so significant?

The British government dispatched about 20,000 German troops help the redcoats to put down the revolt in America. This lecture surveys these Hessian mercenaries’ contributions to the British war machine, including their efforts to sweep Washington’s army out of New York City and back to New Jersey. It also reveals how and why ordinary Americans’ perception of them as thugs capable of ‘ungovernable brutality’ changed—so much so that when the war finally ended, almost 6,000 German veterans chose to put down roots, betting their futures on the prospects of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the newly formed United States.

Over the last 250 years, Americans have named at least 600 towns, counties, parks, lakes, rivers, and schools for the Marquis de Lafayette, the proud French knight who helped their ancestors break from Britain. However, beyond America, Lafayette’s name can be hard to find. That stark contrast informs the questions historian Richard Bell tackles in this talk about Lafayette and how we here in America, and others elsewhere, have chosen to remember him. Lafayette spent the vast majority of his political career in Europe and the struggle to earn a place in that continent’s pantheon of heroes was almost the death of him and still remains a work in progress.

The American Revolution was a war in which Natives fought and died in great numbers; that unfolded deep in the Indigenous interior; and that transformed the continental balance of power. Led by University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, this talk explores the war in Native America through the life of one of its most pivotal figures, a Mohawk woman known as Molly Brant. When her British diplomat husband died in 1774, Brant took over his work, exerting her influence among her Iroquois brethren in backcountry New York to maintain their loyalty to the Crown and earning a reputation among British commanders as exerting an authority over her fellow Iroquois “far superior to that of all their Chiefs put together.”

This talk explores westward expansion and its impact upon Native communities. Even though the phrase ‘manifest destiny’ was not used in print until 1845, the spirit of American expansionism that it referred to was very apparent long before the 1840s. Americans had been talking about pushing westward as if it was their manifest destiny ever since folks in Jamestown in the 1600s had started eyeing the land that Natives were settled on. University of Maryland historian Richard Bell will begin by tracking the story of Native expulsion and westward expansion from the Revolution era up through the 1850s, paying particular attention in the second half to the ways in which the West and Westward Expansion came to be romanticized in the American imagination.

The loss of 13 American colonies shut off a transatlantic passage that the British government had previously used to dump convicted criminals in the colonies in huge quantities. In the wake of independence, the British government urgently began to search for a site for a new penal colony somewhere else. After seven tries and failures elsewhere in its empire, the ministry eventually established a new penal colony near Botany Bay, New South Wales, in 1788.

In the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones made the controversial claim that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” This talk by University of Maryland historian Richard Bell weighs the evidence for and against the 1619 Project’s provocative claim that Americans fought the American revolution to preserve and protect their right to own other human beings as slaves. Is that claim supportable? What’s the evidence? Does any of it hold water?

Britain’s Royal Navy took 11,000 American sailors captive during the Revolutionary War. They spent months or years buried from the world in prisons in England, Ireland, and Scotland—held indefinitely under the terms of a 1777 law that designated them as pirates and traitors, not as official prisoners of war. This talk reconstructs their experiences. It uses as its case study the ordeal of William Russell, a privateer from New England who spent thirty months trying to escape from England’s Mill Prison before being transferred to the Jersey, a de-masted prison hulk floating in Brooklyn Bay in British-occupied New York. On the Jersey, Russell who have to fight for simple survival.

The Quakers—formally known as the Religious Society of Friends—were the first group of white Christians to confront slaveholding as a religious problem that demanded social action. But in the late 1600s, many Quakers were slaveholders themselves. It took energy and activism on the part of a small number of activists within this faith group to disrupt that status quo and steer their church towards an outspoken commitment to Black freedom. This lecture tells that story, focusing in on the 1688 Germantown Protest as well the later crusades of three 18th-century Quaker men—Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet.

In December, 1752, Thomas Thistlewood, a white Jamaican planter, caught one of an enslaved man named Congo Sam, trying to run away. When Thistlewood challenged him, Congo Sam pulled a machete and ran at him. “I will kill you. I will kill you,” he shouted. Thistlewood screamed for help but none of his watching Black workers moved to intervene. This talk with University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell, examines the plantation management strategies that produced such violent resistance. It also reveals that extent of slave uprisings in British North America, using the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina as a case study, and explores the lives of those men and women who escaped slavery by disappearing into the forests and swamps of colonial America.

After the Revolution, a new type of American slave trade rose to eclipse and replace the transatlantic slave trade. This new slave trade took place wholly within the United States as those who owned enslaved people in the Upper South sold their surplus workers to buyers setting up as cotton planters in the Deep South. In this talk, historian Richard Bell tracks the rise and its impact of this ‘Second Middle Passage’ upon the expansion of slavery into new territories and states. We’ll focus, in particular, upon the Black families whom those traders tried to divide and the unrelenting resistance they mounted to try to preserve their kin groups and subvert their enslavers’ aspirations of achieving absolute mastery.

The familiar story of the history of the right to vote in America describes an electoral franchise that has grown fuller and fairer over time as Americans have fought to build a more perfect union. The truth is much more complicated.

On Sunday, July 16, 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, an African American school-teacher and choir-mistress, stepped onto a “whites only” streetcar on New York’s Third Avenue. When the conductor her threw her off, leaving her battered and bruised, Jennings sued for damages, launching the first successful civil disobedience campaign in US history. Led by University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, this talk examines why streetcars were the locus of such frequent and fraught attempts to police the color line in the Jim Crow North and why Black women drove this extraordinary campaign for civil rights.

The Boston Tea Party was a response to the 1773 Tea Act, new legislation designed to reduce tea smuggling within the British Empire and boost the sales of tea imported to the American colonies by the East India Company, a mega corporation with an all-too-cosy relationship to the British Government. But, of course, it all backfired spectacularly. In this talk, historian Dr. Richard Bell argues that the resulting Boston Tea Party marks the first major protest in America against corporate greed and the effects of globalization.

Most people know something about the American Revolution and about the Founding Fathers. But the full story of the Revolution requires us to look beyond their lives and expand its cast of characters. This lecture examines four other revolutionary lives: an immigrant propagandist, a female solider, a fugitive from slavery, and the grieving widow who became the most important Native American leader during the war.

The War of 1812 is the most misunderstood war in American history. But it turns out to have been nothing short of momentous, explains University of Maryland historian Richard Bell. Fought on three fronts, including on the streets of Washington, DC, the War of 1812 unfolded on a grand continental canvas. Like the American Revolution that preceded it, it combined bloody battlefield skirmishes with dramatic home-front conflicts that pitted neighbors and communities against one another. Like the Civil War that followed a half-century later, it was also a struggle involving slavery and slaveholding in which enslaved people themselves would claim decisive roles. More than simply the inspiration for the poem that later became our national anthem, the War of 1812 was a watershed moment in the history of a young republic that should best be understood as both the last battle of the Revolution and the first battle of the Civil War.

The historical network of secret routes to freedom known as the Underground Railroad was neither underground nor a railroad. Why, then, is this the name we had long used to describe it? Historian Richard Bell examines the mysterious origins of this strange term and explains why it caught on so quickly. As the term became commonplace, it helped to build public support for the antislavery cause and push the cause of Black freedom to the center of national debate.

This talk with University of Maryland historian Richard Bell delves into the complex life of William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s only surviving son, whose loyalty to the British Crown set him on a collision course with his revolutionary father. As New Jersey’s colonial governor, William upheld monarchy while Benjamin championed liberty, creating a poignant familial and political rift. The talk examines William’s imprisonment, exile in England, and tireless advocacy for the Crown, contrasting it with his father’s role in shaping a new nation. Through vivid anecdotes, the talk highlights William’s life as a symbol of the personal sacrifices and divided loyalties in the age of the American Revolution.

Salem, 1692: Two young girls living in the household of one of the town’s ministers are acted strangely—having fits. The doctor is called and he tells the minister that his girls are suffering from the action of the Devil’s ‘Evil Hand’ upon them. News of the doctor’s diagnosis quickly spreads and confirms what many in town are already whispering: that these girls are the victims of witch-craft; that they have been cursed by witches living somewhere in Salem. Join University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell for a deep dive into witch-hunting in early America.

In the decade leading up to American independence, white women took on crucial roles in a series of boycotts, petitions, and protests. During the long war that began in 1775, they were also indispensable. As wives and mothers, they encouraged their husbands and sons to enlist, and then managed households and family businesses in their absence.

The struggle for independence had allowed American women to assert themselves as political actors as never before. Would they happily resume their apolitical domestic roles after the war? Or would they demand to be recognized and directly represented in the new political order? This lecture, led by University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, explores these questions by examining the struggle to define white women’s place in politics, voting, and public leadership.

This talk with historian Richard Bell attempts to answer a few deceptively simple questions: Who were the Native peoples that Europeans found when they began to explore and colonize North America beginning in 1492? Where had these Natives peoples come from and how did they live? And who were some of these Europeans and why had they come?

When Benedict Arnold realized his plan to defect to the British had been exposed, the first thing he did was tell Peggy Shippen, his loyalist-leaning wife who had helped him plan his treachery. After the war, Parliament announced plans to resettle refugees like the Arnolds in Canada in order to strengthen Britain’s power in its remaining possessions. Sixty thousand loyalists seized this opportunity—Shippen and Arnold among them. Yet the new lives that awaited the Arnolds there proved to be hard-scrabble, scarring, and wretched, a microcosm of the hardships faced by American loyalists during and after the Revolution.

This talk explores the story of Colonel Tench Tilghman—George Washington’s most trusted aide-de-camp—and his complicated ties to a family torn between loyalty to the Crown and the cause of independence. Discover how General George Washington himself navigated relationships with the Tilghmans—father, uncle, and brothers—on both sides of the war, and what their story reveals about unity, conflict, and the personal costs of nation-building.