Becca Palmer

Becca’s research, funded by the Wolfson Foundation, lies at the intersection of the history of political thought, Early American history, and the digital humanities. Her thesis conducts a conceptual history of political discourse during the American Revolution, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between overarching political theories and the local contexts of their reception.  
 
Her thesis focuses on provincial political thought during the American Revolution, assessing how ideas traditionally associated with the imperial crisis, such as authority, liberty, and virtue, were applied to events at town, county, and colony levels. She challenges the narrative of this period as an ‘imperial crisis’, instead examining the variety of intersecting issues across political levels that captured colonial attention. These include religious divisions, debates during provincial elections, and conflict over land. Becca compares how Revolutionary-era actors interpreted and applied political concepts in different ways as they responded to events across provincial, colonial, and imperial contexts. 

She supplements existing scholarly reliance on pamphlets with a study of newspapers, sermons, magazines, and plays. This will expand the existing source-base of Revolutionary intellectual history, to include sources traditionally deemed non-political, and instead embrace these as sites of political engagement. She focuses on texts from three colonies, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, published during three moments of crisis during the Revolution: the Stamp Act Crisis (1765-6); the introduction of the Townshend Duties (1767-8); and the Coercive Acts (1773-4). By examining these three events, she sheds light on the provincial events that occurred simultaneously and captured local attention, and challenges the periodisation of the Revolution into these neat pivotal moments. 

Finally, she brings Digital History into her project, combining frequency counts of political concepts with thematic analysis of how these were used in specific contexts. This allows her to question understandings of a continuous, consistent ideology, and instead examine how ideas were given different meanings by diverse actors across historical milieus.  

Ultimately, therefore, this thesis will achieve a more nuanced understanding of Revolutionary political thought, by enhancing understandings of how shared political concepts were interpreted in different ways, as actors across diverse spatio-temporal contexts used political discourses to understand, and respond to, different events during the American Revolution.   

PhD

Supervisor: Angus Gowland and Jon Chandler
Working title: ‘In the “Little Spheres” of the Empire: A conceptual analysis of provincial political thought during the American Revolution.

Teaching

• 'The Making of Modern America: The United States since 1920', First Year Module, Institute of the Americas, UCL, 2023-4
• 'Writing History', First Year Module, UCL Department of History, 2023-4

Publications

• Review essay: Peter Moore’s ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and The American Dream (1740-1776)’, Global Intellectual History [In Progress]  
• Blog Post: Sermons as sites of political engagement during the American Revolution, History in Ideas Blog [In Progress]

Conference Papers

• American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, September 2024: Democratic contestation and renovation during the American Revolution. [Upcoming]
• Stanford Graduate Conference in Political Theory, Stanford University, February 2024: In the “Little Spheres” of the empire: The intersection between the local and the imperial in the political discourses of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, 1773-4. 
• Republicanism in the Age of Revolutions, joint conference between UCL, SOAS, Université Paris-8 Saint-Denis, and Université Paris Nanterre, June 2023: Liberty and Property Vindicated: A conceptual analysis of republicanism during the Stamp Act Crisis, 1765-66

Event Organisation/Participation

• Conference Committee, London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought, 20th-21st June, 2024 [Upcoming]
• Seminar Convenor, Institute of Historical Research, History of Political Thought (Early Career) Seminar, 2023-Present 

Public History Engagement

• Mock Debate on the Incorrigible Acts to commemorate the 250th anniversary of their introduction, The National Archives, 1st June 2024