Worlds of 1776 | Sarah Pearsall, “How the World Made the American Revolution”

Join us for conversation with Professor Sarah Pearsall (Johns Hopkins University) about her new book Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution

In this powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. In her sparkling and original Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall uncovers the insurgents, freedom lovers, and dreamers in India, West Africa, North America, Europe, China, and West Indian islands who shaped the nature of American rebellion and nationhood.

Sarah M.S. Pearsall is Professor and Chair of History at Johns Hopkins University; she previously taught for nearly a decade at Cambridge University. She is the author of four books, including Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2008), Polygamy: An Early American History (Yale University Press, 2019), Polygamy: A Very Short Introduction (2022), and most recently, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, came out this year with Knopf Doubleday (U.S.), Picador (U.K.), and Rowohlt Berlin (Germany) in 2026.

This event is part of the "Worlds of 1776" series, co-sponsored by the Department of History, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Bass Connections "Worlds of 1776" research team.

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