New York City’s American Revolution

Representation du Feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck, François Xavier Habermann, 1776. Library of Congress

“What is the Reason, that New York is still asleep or dead, in Politicks and War?” John Adams raged in late June 1776. Independence had not yet been declared, and the famous Massachusetts scribe worried that New Yorkers had yet to fall in line. “Must it always be So?… Have they no sense, no Feeling? No sentiment? No Passions?” Adams just could not understand why New Yorkers’ did not mobilize behind the war effort. Especially since their history of opposing Parliament, dating back to the 1760s, was perhaps more robust than anywhere else in colonial North America. 

This course will explore that decade or so before the Revolution in New York — and the long years that followed, when the city served as military headquarters for the British, home to the Loyalists, the first POWs, and thousands more who suffered under the occupation. Students will examine the causes, courses, and consequences of the war, from the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 to British evacuation in 1783, learning about the elite and nonelite, male and female, free and enslaved populations of New York to better understand why the city, more than any other urban center in colonial America, was central to the Revolution.

Mondays, 5:30-7:00 PM
February 26-April 15
$350 (8 sessions, 90 min. each)

Meet your instructor

Blake McGready

Blake McGready is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He studies the environmental legacy of the American Revolution. He is currently working on a project that examines how revolutionary warfare affected relationships with the natural, nonhuman world in New York state. Blake serves as a co-chair of the CUNY Early American Republic Seminar (EARS). His previous work has been published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies and in the Journal of the American Revolution Annual Volume series. He works at The Gotham Center for New York City History, and previously has worked for the National Park Service.