How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World (U Virginia Press, 2025), Matthew Mason helps answer that piercing question. As he shows, the language of slavery and freedom had long suffused Anglo-American political debates in the eighteenth century, with the Revolution emerging as one particularly hyperdramatic act during which combatants on both sides of the war of words connected the idea of slavery to the headline issues of the day. Mason details how Patriots and Loyalists alike deployed the rhetoric of slavery in their debates about all the crucial questions of the day, including republicanism, taxation and representation, and—by claiming the moral high ground—the nature of the Revolutionary War itself. These debates left complex rhetorical and political legacies for those seeking to abolish and defend slavery in both the new US and the remaining British Empire.

“No one understands the politics of slavery and the rise of antislavery better than Matthew Mason. This is because he knows the original sources and deeply understands what historians have done and where they've taken detours. He keeps his eye on the big picture and his feet on the ground even while explaining the achievements and the limits of those who reached for the higher ground.”

- David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence

“Matthew Mason's important new book cuts through some of the sharpest historiographical debates on the role of slavery and abolition in the Revolutionary Era to reveal a textured and dynamic portrait of the transatlantic political world.”

- Rachel Shelden, Pennsylvania State University, author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War

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Kentucky, 1798: A harrowing series of murders begins. The first body, discovered by cattle drovers, lies bloody at the bottom of a ridge. Then another—a dead boy staring up from a sinkhole. Bodies turn up along roadsides, stuffed into brush. They float to the surface of muddy brooks. For nine terrifying months, over hundreds of miles of Kentucky and Tennessee countryside, the terror unfolds. The killers—two men with hazy backgrounds—are brothers, named Wiley and Micajah Harp.

The Harps killed dozens, but why they did it has eluded folklorists and historians for generations. Almost every story imagines that their motive was pure bloodlust, but for historian Katherine Grandjean, that’s too simple. Instead, she uses the Harp murders to reveal the dark side of the young United States’ independence. These were uncertain and dangerous years—a time when the fledgling federal government could do little to protect its citizens. And if the American Revolution was liberating, it was also deeply destabilizing, politically and socially. Even as it built up some men, it stacked the deck against others, punishing them with volatile markets, lost safety nets, and shattered aspirations. Unspooling the mystery of what sent the Harps reeling exposes the hidden, violent legacies of the revolutionary era.

Bristling with tense, page-turning storytelling—and driven by a historian’s obsessive detective work—Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution (Random House, 2026) recovers these long-forgotten murders as a haunting tale about the darkness at the heart of the American dream.

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The fascinating story of a British army chaplain's buggery trial in 1774 reveals surprising truths about early America.

On the eve of the American Revolution, the British army considered the case of a chaplain, Robert Newburgh, who had been accused of having sex with a man. Newburgh's enemies cited his flamboyant appearance, defiance of military authority, and seduction of soldiers as proof of his low character. Consumed by fears that the British Empire would soon be torn asunder, his opponents claimed that these supposed crimes against nature translated to crimes against the king.

In Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh (JHU Press, 2024) historian John McCurdy tells this compelling story of male intimacy and provides an unparalleled glimpse inside eighteenth-century perceptions of queerness. By demanding to have his case heard, Newburgh invoked Enlightenment ideals of equality, arguing passionately that his style of dress and manner should not affect his place in the army or society. His accusers equated queer behavior with rebellion, and his defenders would go on to join the American cause. Newburgh's trial offers some clues to understanding a peculiarity of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: while gay acts were prohibited by law in much of the British empire, the newly formed United States was comparatively uninterested in legislating against same-sex intimacy.

McCurdy imagines what life was like for a gay man in early America and captures the voices of those who loved and hated Newburgh, revealing how sexuality and revolution informed one another. Vicious and Immoral is the first book to place homosexuality in conversation with the American Revolution, and it dares us to rethink the place of LGBTQ people in the founding of the nation.

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