The American Revolution and The Fate of The World: An Electrifying Global History of a Not-So Local War
Join us for the 2026 Edward Moritz Lecture in History with Dr. Richard Bell, Professor of History at the University of Maryland.
Tuesday, October 27
5:30-6:45 p.m. Eastern
Room 103, Dewing Hall
Summary
When we think of the American Revolution, we often picture a parochial drama: thirteen colonies squaring off against the British Crown in a spirited bid for independence. But this version of the story is only half the truth—and perhaps not even the most interesting half. In this riveting program, historian and author Richard Bell invites audiences to rediscover the Revolution as a world war that unleashed chaos, opportunity, and transformation across six continents. From the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore, from refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America’s own. It was a seismic global event that redrew maps, toppled hierarchies, catalyzed migration, and accelerated new movements for liberty—and for empire.
In this program, Bell traces the far-flung reverberations of the war through the lives of the people it displaced, empowered, or destroyed. Participants will encounter a Native matriarch struggling to preserve a transatlantic military alliance, a Prussian officer reinventing himself in a foreign army, and a Boston schoolteacher shipwrecked thousands of miles from home. Along the way, Bell explores how the Revolution stirred a transoceanic refugee crisis, ignited antislavery activism, and inspired uprisings from Ireland to India. The program offers a bold new framework for understanding the Revolutionary War not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawling, high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea, shaped by commerce, diplomacy, propaganda, and contingency. This is the American Revolution as you’ve never seen it before: complex, global, and astonishingly relevant to the modern world.
About the Speaker
Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He is the author of the book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His new book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, published by Penguin, recently won the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award and the 2026 George Washington Prize.
Contact Information and Livestream
To learn more about this event, please contact Charlene Boyer Lewis at charlene.boyerlewis@kzoo.edu.
The History Department’s annual Edward Moritz Lecture honors the late professor Edward Moritz, who taught British and European history at Kalamazoo College from 1955–1988 and served for many years as the department chair. This lecture is supported by the Moritz Lecture Fund. For more information, contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at alumni@kzoo.edu.