Benjamin Quarles's The Negro in the American Revolution

A New Critical Edition

Benjamin Quarles, Tamika Y. Nunley, Derrick R. Spires

• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781469697567
  9781469697550
• Edition: 3
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469697574
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1961, Benjamin Quarles’s The Negro in the American Revolution remains one of the most comprehensive histories of the presence and politics of Black people in the colonies and their complicated participation in the American Revolution. Enduringly innovative in its source base and subsequent analysis, Quarles’s landmark work continues to serve as a cornerstone for scholars across disciplines. In addition to the original text, this critical edition includes an introduction by the editors and five new essays by historians and literary scholars that bring together methodological insights drawn from Quarles’s original work with the latest innovations in archival research, revealing how gender, geographic location, and placemaking shaped the wartime experiences of Black people.

Contributors include Leslie M. Alexander, Tara A. Bynum, Michael L. Dickinson, Vanessa M. Holden, Adam McNeil, Tamika Y. Nunley, and Derrick R. Spires.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Editors’ Preface
• Introduction. Benjamin Quarles: Unbinding Negro History
• Selected Bibliography of Works by Benjamin Quarles
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Preface
• I. Uncertain Trumpet
• II. “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment”
• III. The Negro and the Rights of Man
• IV. Policy Reversal above the Potomac
• V. Arms-Bearers for America
• VI. Behind the Man behind the Gun
• VII. The British and the Blacks
• VIII. In the King’s Service
• IX. Evacuation with the British
• X. Heirs of the Same Promise
• Bibliography
• Keepers of the Flame: Benjamin Quarles and Black Historiography
• Afro-Virginian Women and Tragedy in the 1781 Virginia Campaign
• “To See Her Children”: Enslaved Women and Resistance in the Trans-Appalachian West
• Phillis Wheatley Passes the Evening with Someone Else’s Husband; or, A Community of “Negroes” and the American Revolution in Rhode Island
• Loyal Only to Liberty: Diasporic Black Resistance in the Age of Revolution
• Notes on Contributors
• Index