While today's presidential tweets may seem a light-year apart from the scratch of quill pens during the era of the American Revolution, the importance of political communication is eternal. This book explores the roles that political narratives, media coverage, and evolving communication technologies have played in precipitating, shaping, and concluding or prolonging wars and revolutions over the course of US history. The case studies begin with the Sons of Liberty in the era of the American Revolution, cover American wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with a look at the conflict against ISIS in the Trump era. Special chapters also examine how propagandists shaped American perceptions of two revolutions of international significance: the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. Each chapter analyzes its subject through the lens of the messengers, messages, and communications-technology-media to reveal the effects on public opinion and the trajectory and conduct of the conflict. The chapters collectively provide an overview of the history of American strategic communications on wars and revolutions that will interest scholars, students, and communications strategists.

The War for American Independence was essentially a civil war throughout the colonies: loyalists and patriots who had grown up together as countrymen found themselves fighting on opposing sides. Troy Bickham asserts that the war proved almost as divisive in the motherland, as the British wielded the almighty pen and went to battle on the pages of the press in Britain. Surpassing the breadth of previous studies on the subject, Making Headlines offers a look at the British press as a whole-including analysis of London newspapers, provincial newspapers, and monthly magazines. The free press in Britain, Bickham argues, was too widespread and too lucrative to be susceptible to significant government interference and therefore provided in-depth coverage on all aspects of the war. Private letters, official dispatches, extracts from foreign newspapers, maps, and detailed tables of fleet strengths and locations filled the pages of daily publications that provided more extensive and more rapid information than even the government could. Due to the inexpensive and easily accessible printed news, the average British citizen was often as well informed as a cabinet minister. The open editorial nature of the press also allowed someone as socially low as a blacksmith's wife, under the cloak of anonymity, to scrutinize and offer commentary on every political decision and military maneuver, all in front of a national audience. Bickham adeptly leads the reader on an exploration into the varied national debates that raged throughout Britain during the American Revolution, one of Britain's historically most unpopular wars. The British public debated how to defeat George Washington-whose perseverance and conduct was much admired in Britain-whether captured Americans should be held as prisoners of war or hung as traitors, and the morality of including American Indians in the war effort. Making Headlines also reflects the global perspective of the war held by most Britons, who saw the conflict not only as a fight for America but also as a struggle to protect their worldwide empire as America's European allies turned the conflict into a world war, threatening even the British Isles themselves. This study will appeal to those interested in early America, the American Revolution, British history, and media studies.

When students gathered in a London coffeehouse and smoked tobacco, Yorkshire women sipped sugar-infused tea, or a Glasgow family ate a bowl of Indian curry, were they aware of the mechanisms of imperial rule and trade that made such goods readily available? In Eating the Empire, Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the `long' eighteenth century (c. 1660-1837), when coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain, reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how the trade in the empire's edibles underpinned the emerging consumer economy, fomenting the rise of modern retailing, visual advertising and consumer credit, and, via taxes, financed the military and civil bureaucracy that secured, governed and spread the empire.

While today's presidential tweets may seem a light-year apart from the scratch of quill pens during the era of the American Revolution, the importance of political communication is eternal. This book explores the roles that political narratives, media coverage, and evolving communication technologies have played in precipitating, shaping, and concluding or prolonging wars and revolutions over the course of US history. The case studies begin with the Sons of Liberty in the era of the American Revolution, cover American wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with a look at the conflict against ISIS in the Trump era. Special chapters also examine how propagandists shaped American perceptions of two revolutions of international significance: the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. Each chapter analyzes its subject through the lens of the messengers, messages, and communications-technology-media to reveal the effects on public opinion and the trajectory and conduct of the conflict. The chapters collectively provide an overview of the history of American strategic communications on wars and revolutions that will interest scholars, students, and communications strategists.

In early 1815, Secretary of State James Monroe reviewed the treaty with Britain that would end the War of 1812. The United States Navy was blockaded in port; much of the army had not been paid for nearly a year; the capital had been burned. The treaty offered an unexpected escape from disaster. Yet it incensed Monroe, for the name of Great Britain and its negotiators consistently appeared before those of the United States. "The United States have acquired a certain rank amongst nations, which is due to their population and political importance," he brazenly scolded the British diplomat who conveyed the treaty, "and they do not stand in the same situation as at former periods." Monroe had a point, writes Troy Bickham. In The Weight of Vengeance, Bickham provides a provocative new account of America's forgotten war, underscoring its significance for both sides by placing it in global context. The Napoleonic Wars profoundly disrupted the global order, from India to Haiti to New Orleans. Spain's power slipped, allowing the United States to target the Floridas; the Haitian slave revolt contributed to the Louisiana Purchase; fears that Britain would ally with Tecumseh and disrupt the American northwest led to a pre-emptive strike on his people in 1811. This shifting balance of power provided the United States with the opportunity to challenge Britain's dominance of the Atlantic world. And it was an important conflict for Britain as well. Powerful elements in the British Empire so feared the rise of its former colonies that the British government sought to use the War of 1812 to curtail America's increasing maritime power and its aggressive territorial expansion. And by late 1814, Britain had more men under arms in North America than it had in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, with the war with America costing about as much as its huge subsidies to European allies. Troy Bickham has given us an authoritative, lucidly written global account that transforms our understanding of this pivotal war.

In early 1815, Secretary of State James Monroe reviewed the treaty with Britain that would end the War of 1812. The United States Navy was blockaded in port; much of the army had not been paid for nearly a year; the capital had been burned. The treaty offered an unexpected escape from disaster. Yet it incensed Monroe, for the name of Great Britain and its negotiators consistently appeared before those of the United States. "The United States have acquired a certain rank amongst nations, which is due to their population and political importance," he brazenly scolded the British diplomat who conveyed the treaty, "and they do not stand in the same situation as at former periods." Monroe had a point, writes Troy Bickham. In The Weight of Vengeance, Bickham provides a provocative new account of America's forgotten war, underscoring its significance for both sides by placing it in global context. The Napoleonic Wars profoundly disrupted the global order, from India to Haiti to New Orleans. Spain's power slipped, allowing the United States to target the Floridas; the Haitian slave revolt contributed to the Louisiana Purchase; fears that Britain would ally with Tecumseh and disrupt the American northwest led to a pre-emptive strike on his people in 1811. This shifting balance of power provided the United States with the opportunity to challenge Britain's dominance of the Atlantic world. And it was an important conflict for Britain as well. Powerful elements in the British Empire so feared the rise of its former colonies that the British government sought to use the War of 1812 to curtail America's increasing maritime power and its aggressive territorial expansion. And by late 1814, Britain had more men under arms in North America than it had in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, with the war with America costing about as much as its huge subsidies to European allies. Troy Bickham has given us an authoritative, lucidly written global account that transforms our understanding of this pivotal war.

In 1720s London, a well-known band of young ruffians gave themselves crescent tattoos and adorned turbans in honor of their so-called "mohamattan [Muslim]" Indian namesakes, the Mohawk. Few Britons noticed the gang's mistaken muddling of North American and Indian subcontinent geographies and cultures. Even fewer cared in an age in which "Indian" was a catch-all term applied to theatre characters, philosophies, and objects whose only common characteristic often was that they were not European. Yet just thirty years later, when the North American empire had entered center stage, Londoners bought Iroquois tomahawks at auctions; provincial newspapers debated Cherokee politics; women shopkeepers read aloud newspaper accounts of frontier battles as their husbands counted the takings; church congregations listened to the sermons of American Indian converts; families toured museum exhibits of American Indian artefacts; and Oxford dons wagered their bottles of port on the outcome of American wars.
Focusing on the question, 'How did the British who remained in Britain perceive American Indians, and how did these perceptions reflect and affect British culture?', Savages within the Empire explores both how Britons engaged with the peripheries of their Atlantic empire without leaving home, and, equally important, how their forged understanding significantly affected the British and their rapidly expanding world. It draws from a wide range of evidence to consider an array of eighteenth-century contexts, including material culture, print culture, imperial government policy, the Church of England's missionary endeavours, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the public outcry over the use of AmericanIndians as allies during the American War of Independence. By chronicling and exploring discussions and representations of American Indians in these contexts, Troy Bickham reveals the proliferation of empire-related subjects in eighteenth-century British culture as well as the prevailing pragmatism with which Britons approached them.