Among Strangers in a Distant Climate: Loyalist Exiles Define Empire and Nation, 1775-1783

Between 1775 and 1783, the American Revolution drove more than 60,000 Loyalists from their homes and scattered them throughout the British Empire, but correspondence linked them together and with their former homes in America.The exiles used correspondence to interpret and diffuse information, and they politicized long-distance connections to shape their own futures. This project uses Loyalist correspondence networks to examine how these exiles crafted and empowered new identities and in the process helped to reshape the British Empire and the United States.