Reassessing the American Revolution in the Atlantic World: AMERICA2026

Members of the America2026 consortium and its wider community of scholars individually and collectively produce research seeking to contribute and to renew the historiography of the American revolution. The range of publications presented on this site includes past newsletters, in which activities and events surrounding the 250^th anniversary of American independence have been promoted monthly since October 2022 ; recent special issues of scholarly journals dedicated to the American revolution and its historiographies ; recently published and upcoming edited books that reflect the variety and wealth of present-day collective research on the late 18^th century; and lastly, the varied publications of our consortium members, who come from the fields of early American and Atlantic history, the military, social, political and cultural histories of the American revolution, and European and global histories of the revolutionary age.

Members of the America2026 consortium are working in partnership with members of the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago to produce a searchable database of European Printed Sources on the American Revolution (EPSAR). Led by Carine Lounissi (Rouen-Normandie), the America2026 EPSAR team of experienced researchers will visit libraries and archival collections across Europe to find and compile the wide range of European texts addressing and discussing the events of and surrounding the American revolution and published between 1763 and 1789, in their original European languages or in translation, organized by coinciding linguistic and geographic areas–  French, British, Italian, Germanic, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese, Scandinavian, Slavic and Hungarian. EPSAR’s aim is to make these lesser-known sources about the American revolution as a European event available to researchers, who will be able to navigate this corpus via its directory containing data about the origins, publication history and key content of each text.

Working with Carine Lounissi are Clovis Gladstone (University of Chicago, US), coordinator of the ARTFL database, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Paris 8, PI), Florence Petroff (La Rochelle) and Agnès Delahaye (Lyon 2).

Students and scholars from all around the globe will gather at the University of Strasbourg in the summer of 2026 in the buzzing European city of Strasbourg, France. This unique experience will feature discussion- based sessions led by faculty members from the U.S. and the E.U. Strasbourg students and their peers from various countries and representing both two- and four-year intuitions will work in small groups to discuss the continued significance of texts that laid the foundations of modern republican governments. Guided by pedagogy developed by the Great Questions Foundation, which aims to help foster engaged citizens in functioning democracies, selected student participants will embark upon an intellectual journey to explore how the founding principles of the American Revolution continue to operate in the world today, and how people have come to understand them differently and more deeply.

The America2026 program aims to provide teachers and educators with accessible tools and materials to teach the history of the American revolution through the prism of recent historical findings and developing trends. They include panels and documentary sources for the organization of educational events and exhibitions around the anniversary of American independence in 2026 ; a Companion in French to familiarize non-specialist publics with the main events and ideas of the revolutionary period (La Révolution américaine et la naissance des États-Unis, 1763-1800, Carine Lounissi, Éric Schnakenbourg, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (dir.), Paris, Armand Colin, 2026) ; and the regular engagement with students and the wider general public through talks, public lectures and interviews. Members of the educational resources committee led by Eric Schnakenbourg (Nantes) are Virginie Adane (Nantes), Florence Petroff (La Rochelle) and Ghislain Potriquet (Strasbourg).

In 2026 the Musée du Nouveau Monde (Museum of the New World) at La Rochelle will host an exhibition curated in collaboration with the AMERICA2026 exhibition committee, illustrating how French people knew about the American Revolution and how they reacted to the creation of a new political system across the Atlantic. A variety of over 50 prints, paintings, objects, books, and manuscripts will be exposed, some in digitized, interactive format, to reveal the multifaceted echo of American Independence in France. Set in a remarkable space dedicated to the economic, social and cultural impact of the Americas on the French Atlantic port of La Rochelle, in the former residence of a prominent local sugar and slave merchant, this exhibition will also present to the school and the general public a decentered, global view of American events, in order to allow them to further see the connections between America, Europe and the world in the second half of the 18^th century.

The exhibition committee is led by Florence Petroff (La Rochelle) in partnership with Mélanie Moreau (Musée du Nouveau Monde), Ghislain Potriquet (Strasbourg), Françoise Coste (Toulouse Jean Jaurès) and Carine Lounissi (Rouen-Normandie).