Come, Help Us Disturb the King’s Peace!
How Massachusetts Upset the Empire - Lecture & Dinner
The Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America - Massachusetts invite you to welcome Professor Lisa Ford to Prescott House
Tuesday, November 19, 2019 Lecture at 6:00 PM Cocktails at 7:00 PM Dinner at 7:45 PM
William Hickling Prescott House Headquarters of NSCDA-MA 55 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts Tel: 617-742-3190 Note: Parking available across the street in the Boston Common Garage
Lisa Ford from the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia will explore the significance of the Revolution from the Empire’s point of view and demonstrate how breaches of the peace in Boston transformed the constitution of empire. Rioting mobs did more than burn boats on the common or break the windows in the houses of unpopular administrators. Violence in Boston challenged the king's sovereignty in America by showing his incapacity to keep the peace.
Disorder in Boston fed a growing conviction that the King needed more power in the colonies - a resolution that was also fed by simultaneous but very different disorders in Quebec and in Caribbean slave colonies. By placing disorderly Boston in this context, Professor Ford argues that the real legacy of the American Revolution in the British world was counterrevolutionary - it caused a shift towards more coercive policing and away from colonial self-government that lasted for generations.
Professor Ford is Associate Dean of Research at the University of New South Wales. Trained originally as a lawyer, and then in American History at Columbia University in New York, her scholarship has followed the evolution of constitutions across the British Empire. Massachusetts served as both model and anti-model for British colonial governments.
It is our good fortune that this charming intellectual powerhouse will be in Boston for the convention of the American Society of Legal History.