After the Declaration
T. H. Breen, Paul Halliday
A dramatic trial during the Revolutionary War helped Americans reckon with the significance of independence from Great Britain. In The American Revolution on Trial: A New Nation Confronts the Burden of Independence, T. H. Breen, emeritus professor of American history at Northwestern University, explores how a court case against an American colonel and the response of American military officers to a British general provided the setting for the new nation to assert its political and cultural independence and to show itself and the world that it was capable of delivering justice and securing the rule of law.
During this saga, an American prosecutor, who trained in the law offices of future president John Adams, helped to establish the legitimacy of the American republic, as he offered a critique of nobility and aristocratic privilege while making the case for a political order based on equality. Breen joins moderator Paul Halliday, UVA professor of history.
The Nau Lab's “Touchstones of Democracy” series explores key events, places, thinkers, and texts that inform the history and principles of democracy.
Speakers
T. H. Breen
Professor Emeritus, Northwestern University
T. H. Breen
Professor Emeritus, Northwestern University
T. H. Breen is a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He received a BA and PhD from Yale University and an honorary degree from Oxford. He has authored over 10 books, among which are Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, and The American Revolution on Trial: A New Nation Confronts the Burden of Independence.
Breen taught at Northwestern University and Caltech. He was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University, the Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University, and the Kluge Professor of American Constitutional Law at the Library of Congress. He was awarded a Guggenheim and an Alexander von Humboldt prize at the Max Planck Institute for History at Gottingen. And he is an honorary fellow at the Historisches Kolleg and the Rachel Carson Institute for Environmental Studies (Munich). Breen writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
Paul Halliday
Julian Bishko Professor of History, Corcoran Department of History, UVA
Paul Halliday
Julian Bishko Professor of History, Corcoran Department of History, UVA
Paul Halliday is Julian Bishko Professor of History in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History. He writes about the legal history of Britain and its empire from the 16th to 19th centuries. His most recent book, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Harvard University Press, 2010) won the 2011 Inner Temple Book Prize. He frequently consults in the writing of briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on issues connected to English legal history.
Halliday is currently preparing a book on the work of English law in Sri Lanka in the early 19th century, the adoption of jury trials in criminal cases, and repeated contests between justices and the island's British governor, especially during security crises.
Halliday’s research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. He is now working on two research projects. One explores how record-keeping practices and other material forms (for instance, courtroom design) constituted law from the 16th to 20th centuries in England and throughout the British empire. The other is concerned with the judicial role in making empire. He is currently studying the Supreme Court of Ceylon in the early 19th century, their adoption of jury trials in criminal cases, and repeated contests between justices and the island's British governor, especially during security crises. Through all his work runs a persistent interest in rethinking English law’s history and the use of that history in U.S. courts, as well as an interest in the relationship of English law to other legal regimes around the globe.
Halliday received a BA from Wesleyan University and an MA/PhD from the University of Chicago.