Outside of the classroom, we are both passionate fans of complicated “universes” (Jen for Real Housewives and Jeff for Star Wars). In both cases, we often rely upon some sort of dramatis personae to decipher the varied character origins, motivations, and the extent of world-building (not to mention the Real Housewives Reunions). As scholars that use the framework of a Vast Early America in the classroom, we also realized that this approach for creating a “cast of characters” was a useful pedagogical practice to address complicated topics and challenge preconceived notions held by our students. For example, we have often found that our students in their previous studies of the American Revolution were exposed to a singular monolithic Loyalist painted as the antagonist to the colonists in rebellion. As one historian argues, “Loyalists are often stereotyped as members of a small conservative elite: rich, educated, Anglican, and with strong ties to Britain.”[1] In our American Revolution classes, introducing a cast of characters—or a dramatis personae—became an effective tool to demonstrate the complexity, agency, and decision-making processes from a varied cast of British Loyalists.

Reception of the American Loyalists by Great Britain in the Year 1783. Engraving by Henry Moses, original by Benjamin West. Wikimedia Commons.

This classroom activity was inspired by Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. Prior to her first chapter, Jasanoff includes paragraph-length summaries of nine Loyalists. These ranged from former royal governors like John Murray and Guy Carlton, adventurer and filibusterer William Augustus Bowles, enslaved people David George and George Liele, recent immigrant to the colonies John Cruden, and the middle-class memoirist Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston. The diverse perspectives and motivations outlined in the summaries aligned with both of our course’s learning outcomes, which encouraged students to understand the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution that extended beyond the borders and founders of a new United States.

Jasanoff’s short summaries were well suited for jigsaw teaching methods and as a single class-length activity. Jigsaw activities help demonstrate student mastery over a subject as they become “experts” on a specific topic, theme, or individual that they will then teach (or share their mastery of the subject with) the rest of the class.[2] This form of a jigsaw was simplified so that reading and prep was done in class, highlighting the value of Jasanoff’s shortened “cast of characters.” Each student was paired with a particular Loyalist in class and got to work. To encourage this critical analysis, we provided our students with a few guiding questions:

1. What “basic” information do we get about your Loyalist? (For example, what is their age, their gender, social class, race, and where are they from?)
2. What were their lives like before or during the Revolution?
3. What were their lives like after the Revolution?
4. As historians, what questions do you still have about your Loyalist?

After working with other students who shared the same Loyalist, students are then broken into “jigsaw” groups where they take turns sharing their Loyalist’s experiences. In jigsaw groups, students often discover connections and similarities between the characters. For example, two of our Loyalists—David George and George Liele—knew one another; many others landed in the same places, like Nova Scotia or Jamaica. Similar to what Kathleen DuVal argues in Independence Lost when charting the impact of the American Revolution on the many different nations and peoples of the Gulf South, using individual characters as “stand ins” for larger communities and their motivations demonstrates to students that “the most complete history is a multi-perspectival one” that is both vast in scope and inherently intimate.[3]

Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, Wikimedia Commons.

In our final debriefs, the question on the experiences of Loyalists after the Revolution challenged our students to think beyond the thirteen colonies to the effect of the American Revolution on a global scale. For this conversation, Jen created an interactive Google Map for the Loyalists’ diaspora as they tried to make sense of the changed world. For example, Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston’s moves included South Carolina, Scotland, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia. Mapping these movements demonstrated the ways in which Loyalists’ lives did not simply end with the Revolution, nor were they “unblinking followers of British rule.”[4]

Snapshot of Loyalist Diaspora Google Map. Created by Jennifer Monroe McCutchen.

A cast-of-characters approach is scalable for a wide variety of early American classroom settings, from survey to topic-specific senior seminars. In our courses, it often encourages new questions from students for the remainder of the semester on the experiences of people often confined to the periphery of the American Revolution. For scholars interested in this method, tools and companion pieces are presently available to help. For example, Emma Rothschild’s book The Inner Light of Empires, based on the eighteenth-century Scottish family, the Johnstones, offers a companion website with summaries and maps on the peoples and places “most central” to her work that charts the intimate networks within the rise of the British Empire. The Museum of the American Revolution’s “Finding Freedom” interactive is an excellent entry point for survey level courses to engage in critical analysis of primary and secondary source materials while comparing and contrasting the lived experiences of five enslaved peoples and their struggles for freedom during the Revolution. Similarly, sites like ArcGIS and Knightlab’s StoryMaps provide students the tools to create their own microhistories that interweave digital history methods and extend the use of a cast of characters for semester-long projects.

Whether in the Star Wars universe, the Bravoverse, or the college classroom, historical stories and people swirl together and branch out in complicated worlds. A dramatis personae of Loyalists challenged our students’ preconceived notions of the American Revolution and provided an easily accessible framework to engage in this vaster and more complicated world of this era. Furthermore, students practiced the five C’s of historical thinking—change over time, context, causality, complexity, and contingency—that not only benefitted them in our courses, but demonstrated the significance of our field outside of the classroom. As we have argued elsewhere, in a world where there is an increase in LLM (Large Language Model) use and rising disinformation, these skills become that much more essential.[5]

Endnotes

[1] Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011), 8.

[2] As historian Lindsey Passenger Wieck argues, jigsaw activities are best paired with readings that are easily divided among students and provide “a way to tackle big pieces of scholarship without students needing to read an entire book,” or, in our cases, a way to introduce a more complicated outlook on a well-worn topic.

[3] Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York, 2016), xviii.

[4] Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 11.

[5] We have previously collaborated on pedagogical practices—including recent publications based on the use of Large Language Models (LLMS) and American Indian history and on the significance of our role as subject matter experts to teach a Vast Early America. See Jeffrey Washburn  and Jennifer M. McCutchen. “AI Meets AI: ChatGPT as a Pedagogical Tool to Teach American Indian History,” Critical Humanities 2, no. 2 (2024), DOI: https://doi.org/10.33470/2836-3140.1037