Speaker

Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor

Historian of early America and Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia; one of only five historians to have won the Pulitzer Prize in History twice.

Taylor earned his PhD at Brandeis and built his career on deeply archival studies of colonial and early republican America — frontier settlement, Native dispossession, the Loyalist exodus to Canada, the War of 1812, and slavery in the early South. His first Pulitzer came in 1996 for William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which also won the Bancroft Prize; his second came in 2014 for The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. His recent work forms a continental trilogy — American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (2016), American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 (2021), and American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873 (2024) — which treats the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean as one interlocking system rather than separate national stories.

Core positions

  • The Revolution’s costs and benefits split unevenly across British North America. Financing American war debt through land sales and taxes made land dearer in the new United States, while British subsidy of Canadian government let it give land away free — a deliberate strategy to draw settlers, and loyalty, back into the empire.
  • North American history is continental, not national. The same forces — population pressure, capital flows, contested land and labour systems — shaped the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean together during the mid-19th century; treating the US Civil War in isolation from Mexico’s own civil war or the Caribbean’s divergent trajectories misses the connections.
  • The Mexican War’s conquered territory made the Civil War very hard to avoid. Once North and South had hardened into incompatible visions of the good society over which labour system would govern new Western land, Taylor sees no realistic path to compromise between 1850 and 1861 — a stronger claim of inevitability than most historians are willing to make.
  • Persistence of a threat is not proof it was avoidable. Canada came close to American absorption at three separate moments — the War of 1812, the tense decades after, and a genuinely winnable 1865 invasion — and each time economic interdependence or simple war-weariness, not military necessity, tipped the outcome the other way.

In the wiki