Friends of Freedom

Micah Alpaugh is Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. His previous publications include Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787-1795 (2015), The French Revolution: A History in Documents (2021), and articles in European History Quarterly, Journal of Social History, and French Historical Studies.

'… a bold and wide-ranging thesis … does much more than offer parallel histories of the radical movements that swept through large parts of the Atlantic world in the later eighteenth century. It moves seamlessly from the demands of the American Sons of Liberty in the 1760s to the campaigns of the United Irishmen, the movement for parliamentary reform in Britain, the role of popular societies in the French Revolution, antislavery campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France, and popular organization during the revolution in Saint-Domingue.' Alan Forrest, Journal of Modern History

• Introduction; Part I. The American revolution ignites social movements: 1. The sons of liberty and the creation of a movement model; 2. From boycott mobilization to the American revolution; 3. Wilkes, liberty, and the Anglo-American crisis; 4. The British association movement and Parliamentary reform; 5. The Irish volunteers and Militant reform; 6. Religious freedom, political liberty, and protestant dissenter civil rights; 7. The rise of American abolitionism; 8. British abolitionism and the Broadening of Social Movements; Part II. The French revolution radicalizes social movements: 9. The genesis of the French Jacobins; 10. French revolutionary polarization and the coming of the Haitian Revolution; 11. The French Jacobin network in power; 12. Radicalizing club life in 1790s Britain; 13. The United Irishmen in an Atlantic crosswind; 14. The French revolution and the making of the American democratic party; 15. From revolutionary committees to American electoral party politics.