Dr. Steven Pitt, associate professor of History, published a chapter in October in the “Cambridge History of the American Revolution,” a three-volume collection.

Pitt’s chapter examines the non-violent and violent actions of laboring people against injustices perpetrated by those in power prior to the American Revolution. It takes a transatlantic approach to examine riots, mutiny, piracy and insurrections by free and enslaved people. The chapter takes a dialectical approach to when and how laboring people acted out against authority.

Reduced economic opportunities, attacks on the moral economy, and food shortages often led to riots or more extreme insurrections on both sides of the Atlantic. Attacks on individual freedom, such as the institution of naval and military impressment or taxation, tended to lead to petty resistance in Europe and more severe action in the Americas.

Meanwhile, enslaved people resisted at all levels and sought to take advantage whenever cracks in the system appeared. Together, the resistance of laboring people generated examples of action and a language of liberty for rebels in North America seeking independence from the British Empire on the eve of the American Revolution.

Pitt has also been invited to present a chapter from his book project “Chaos in God’s City: The Paradox of Seafarers in Puritan Boston” at the Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The book explores a little-known mutiny and insurrection that took place in Boston on April 18, 1689. The chapter, meanwhile, examines the destabilizing preliminary events in 1686 and 1687.

The seminar will be held Dec. 2, 2025, at 5 p.m. in a hybrid format and is open to the public via this link: https://www.masshist.org/events/Devil-Unleashed. Feel free to join.