The Rediscovery of America: Transatlantic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution

Europe's rediscovery of America was not, as in the days of Cabot and Columbus, a matter of navigation. It was an imaginative response to the American Revolution. Historians have argued that revolutionary events in America led to the fall of the Bastille, and point to an "Atlantic Revolution." Without taking sides in that long-running debate, this study seeks to show how the transatlantic experience colored the perceptions of some twenty Britons, Americans and Frenchmen whose careers spanned the Atlantic during the revolutionary period. The evidence of their writings and correspondence reveals that contemporaries wrote and acted as if they thought they were involved in an Atlantic Revolution.