Graduate Student, History
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John L. Brooke
Alan Gallay Margret Newell |
About
My research interests include early American social and economic dynamics in an Atlantic context. Past projects have explored social and economic mobility, frontier market development and an examination of military service during the Revolution through a labor lens.
Current Project: “Levelers & Dissenters in the Land of Liberty: The Squatter Populist Movement and the American Revolution, 1750 to 1803” examines squatter culture and the development of a sociopolitical consciousness among migrants to the Susquehanna, Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. Colonial self-preservation strategies contributed to a communality focused ethos that shaped backcountry migration, settlement, society, politics, and economy. With the necessary location, manpower, and supplies, thriving squatter communities unequivocally supported the western theater of America’s War for independence. Fundamentally, however, the cultural transformation squatters underwent during the Revolutionary era transformed them into a people who opposed the new republic’s promotion of individual oriented Republicanism.
Through quantitative data and mapping my research has identified a pattern of migration manifested in three waves of successive resettlement. The first wave originated in the Susquehanna River Valley, 1768 to 1772, with migrants moving to the Ohio River Valley. Between 1780 and 1784 a second wave of squatters crossed the Ohio River to inhabit the west bank and branches of the river south from Pittsburgh by four hundred miles. Finally, throughout the late 1780s and into the 1790s the last squatter migration left the Ohio Country for the Illinois Country.
My research demonstrates dispossession and migration defined squatters better than the land ownership views they shared with Native Americans and other Europeans. The largest, segment of this project illustrates the Revolutionary War experience of the frontier lower sort from a military, social, political, and economic perspective.
Please feel free to contact me with questions, suggestions, and the like. Following the thinly threaded leads left by backcountry people, this project has transformed in a variety of exciting ways. The story I found is far more interesting than any story I could have set out to find & I look forward to sharing it with you.
