Thursday, May 30, 2013

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff "recovers the stories of ordinary people whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events," the losers of the American Revolution.

Jasanoff, in a groundbreaking study, charts the exodus of over 60,000 British subjects living in America who were loyal to the British empire. She describes what she calls the "spirit of 1783," a commitment on the part of Loyalist refugees to "authority, liberty, and global reach" in the British empire. Yet these refugees were not a homogenous group racially, ethnically, socially, or even politically. And their experiences as they ranged as far as Canada, the Caribbean, and Sierra Leone, were just as varied.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Jasanoff explains why many historians, and Americans in general, are unaware of the Loyalists' remarkable story: "Everybody knows that winners write the history. The problems start when we read that history and forget how it is slanted." Jasanoff combines analysis with narration to create an illuminating and entertaining reading experience that complicates what most of learned in high school history class. She begins her book with a cast of characters whom we follow on their journeys out of America and into the world beyond, expanding the British empire as they went. Jasanoff notes that "there is something bittersweet about many of these people's stories." We will consider the question with which she ends her book: "So what did all those losses, displacements, and overturned lives amount to in the end? Was it fair to see the loyalists' trauma, like the empire's (with the loss of the thirteen colonies), ending a generation later in a kind of triumph?

Liberty's Exiles won numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Washington Book Prize, and a Recognition of Excellence from the Cundill Prize in History. Amanda Foreman, writing for The Times (London), says "Liberty's Exiles is not only a masterful historical study, it is also a jolly good read."

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, June 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, June 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.