After the Great War: Revolution and Constitution (1763-1815)

Continuing from here and here, I really need to expand on this sentence from my Sendai talk:

As Conde and Mukherjee hint, the aftershocks of England’s catastrophic victory over France in the great war of the eighteenth century paradoxically created the conditions for the age of revolutions across the hemisphere.

Because it's not enough to be "no doubt the profoundest Hawthorne blogger for at least one millenium to come, or two," I have to colonize all of American (in the continental and hemispheric sense as well as the national one) literature in a grand new metanarrative of not-just-U.S. literary history, too.

But the problem is I have to go to a party with the new 21st Century Program students and my faculty associate's cigarette is only going to last so long.

So let me just give a hat tip to Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations and thank my students in my Intro to American Studies and Postcolonial Hawthorne classes from the fall semester for getting me thinking that what we call the French and Indian Wars and what others call the Seven Years' War might just be to the eighteenth century what WW II was for the twentieth. More on this later!