Teaching American History With NYPL Digital Collections: Revolutionary New York

A seven-year insurrection that transformed a distant English colony into an independent country.  An enduring patriotic rallying point. The defining event in a long and complex narrative of American exceptionalism. An intellectual revolution that gave new meaning to ideas of “freedom” and “liberty”—yet revealed their racial and gendered limits. The American Revolution holds a lot of complicated meanings for historians and citizens alike.

Few realize that the first major battle of the Revolution took place right here in New York. Teaching the American Revolution from the perspective of New York City offers an accessible, place-based opportunity to engage students in one of the most important eras in American history. And The New York Public Library has a bevy of resources to support students and educators on this journey. 

In this guide, as in past ones, I’ve put together a curated group of documentary resources that can be tailored to many different levels and classrooms, from middle and high school social studies classes to undergraduate and graduate courses. Individual documents from NYPL’s Digital Collections provide excellent materials that can be used to excite the imaginations of students and teach them document analysis. More advanced students can pursue independent research projects using many of NYPL’s e-resources, as well as digitized materials available via NYPL’s archives and manuscripts portal. Along the way, I’ll also share tried-and-true teaching resources from other institutions.

Revolutionary New York: The Basics

Early in the morning on August 27, 1776, in what is today the borough of Brooklyn, shots were fired in the first major battle of the American Revolution. The Battle of Long Island proved to be a humiliating defeat for the Continental Army; the only silver lining was the narrow escape of General George Washington across the East River in the dead of night on August 30, allowing him to fight another day. Within a month of the battle’s end, the British had taken control of Manhattan and the surrounding areas. 

For the next seven years, New Yorkers lived under British military rule. Patriots were imprisoned, while loyalists supported and often benefited from British control. But the majority of New Yorkers navigated the gray area in between, biding their time as the war wore on. On November 25, 1783, New Yorkers cheered as the British Army departed, replaced by the newly-victorious Continental Army. "Evacuation Day," as it came to be called, marked the end of over seven years of military occupation. 

For a thorough examination of New York before and during the Revolution, check out Barnet Schecter’s The Battle for New York: The City At the Heart of the American Revolution. Instructors looking for an engaging book to assign students might consider Robert Sullivan's My American Revolution. Though it’s not a traditional history monograph, it is filled with details about the physical and temporal trajectory of the war and also considers the ways we remember and commemorate war in the places that it occurred.

Mapping the Pre-Revolutionary City

In the decade before the Revolutionary War, New York City was emerging as the most powerful financial center in the American colonies. The city had deep ties to the British crown, yet it was negatively impacted by the new taxes being levied on the colonies. New Yorkers reacted with particular rage to the 1765 Stamp Act, which taxed nearly every form of paper used in the colonies. They established the Sons of Liberty in the city and protested throughout the winter and spring of 1766, prompting the Crown to repeal the law later that year. 

Against this backdrop, two surveyors created maps of New York City, a few years apart. John Montresor was sent to the colonial city in the midst of violent and ongoing protests over the Stamp Act. There he surveyed in secret, afraid to expose himself as an agent of the crown to enraged New Yorkers. By contrast, Bernard Ratzer arrived in New York to survey for his map after the repeal of the Stamp Act. The city had calmed down significantly and city leaders expressed New York’s deep loyalty to the Crown. Because of this historical context, Montresor’s depiction of New York contained inaccuracies and lacked the detail—street names, property ownership, topography—that Ratzer’s map provided. 

Instructors can find both of these maps, the Ratzer and the Montresor, in NYPL’s Digital Collections. They offer an excellent opportunity to fuse a map-based analysis with content-focused lessons about the British Acts that eventually edged the colony toward revolution. Such an exercise is best done after students read an article about the two maps for context. I suggest “The Montresor-Ratzer-Sauthier Sequence of Maps of New York City, 1766-76,” a short article by W.P. Cumming, accessible via JSTOR with a valid NYPL library card . 

Teachers may choose to have students conduct a map comparison on their own, in small groups, or together as a class. I recommend straightforward questions that walk students through each step of analysis. Ask them to notice similarities and differences on each map and to consider what information can be gleaned about late 18th-century New York. Consider providing close ups of particular sections of the map to help students visually focus. You might also include in your document analysis handout excerpts from the contextual reading, if there are particular bits of context you want students to recall, or excerpts from related primary sources, like John Montresor’s journals from his time in New York.

For more guidance on how to structure a lesson about maps, check out Brooklyn Historical Society’s curriculum about the Ratzer map, which provides document analysis ideas and helpful context that can be adapted for students of many levels. 

Patriots and Loyalists

When we teach and learn about the American Revolution, we often lump historical actors into two categories: patriots, the fomenters of revolution, who agitated and fought for independence from the Crown; and loyalists, who remained committed to the British monarchy, and who cooperated or even aided the British in their attempts to quell a colonial rebellion. 

But in reality, colonists’ identities and affiliations were more complicated. It’s essential for students to understand that the outcome of the Revolution was by no means obvious to most of the people who lived through it. In occupied New York, residents had to weigh political beliefs, financial interests, and fears of reprisal every day. For more background on residents’ fraught and multilayered political affiliations, take a look at Judith L. Van Buskirk’s Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York.

One digitized document in NYPL’s archives and manuscript portal reveals the complicated nature of loyalism in New York, and allows students to make inferences about which colonists might lean toward loyalism, and which toward independence. The “List of loyalists against whom judgments were given under the Confiscation Act,” a roster of judgments against loyalists in the state of New York, was compiled in 1802, several decades after the end of the war. But it took its data from Revolutionary-era documents between 1780 and 1783, well before Americans declared victory. The 40-page document is essentially a compilation of names, organized alphabetically, and includes information about town and county of residence, occupation, and dates of judgement. 

Teachers can do a lot with this primary source. They might ask students to analyze correlation between loyalism and certain occupations. They might assign groups of students a demographic category—years, counties, or towns, for example—and ask each group to report back with their findings. As a follow up assignment, students can select a loyalist from the list who has a prominent New York name—perhaps one related to a street or other landmark in the city or state—and research and write a short biography.

Undergraduate or early graduate instructors can take this opportunity to teach students a key research skill—compiling spreadsheets of data that can later be sorted and manipulated for analysis. Check out "Historians' Spreadsheet," a useful guide from the 2014 “Doing Digital History” conference hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Dual-date document—primary sources that use data from an earlier historical date (in this case 1780-1783), and are created at a slightly later historical date (in this case 1802)—tend to be a great opportunity to dig deeper into the “why” of a document. Assigning a short writing assignment asking students to interrogate who created this document, when, and why is a great way to conclude analysis of the loyalist list.

Slavery and Freedom 

One of the great contradictions of the American Revolution was the way that white Revolutionary leaders leveraged ideas of freedom and liberty, slavery and injustice, even as they themselves enslaved people of African descent. Interrogating the rhetoric of slavery and freedom during the Revolution can provide a framework through which to understand these paradoxes not just during the Founding period, but throughout American history. 

Revolutionary-era newspapers reveal in real-time how language about slavery and slaves was deployed in contradictory ways. America’s Historical Newspapers is a database (accessible with a NYPL library card) that includes newspapers dating back to the 18th century. It offers the opportunity to search keywords and analyze different linguistic uses. Instructors can walk students through the search process, or ask more advanced students to explore on their own. 

When you access America’s Historical Newspapers, you will automatically be searching all 20 databases spanning several centuries, so start by limiting your search. Click on the button ”searching 20 out of 20 databases” and select only “Series 1: From Colonies to Nation.” Now try some keywords. I started with the word “slave.” Once my results came up, I used the faceting capability on the left of the screen to limit by time period (1776-1783) and by place of publication (New York). 

With these results (I got 33), instructors can ask students to locate an instance in which the word “slave” has been used as a protest against tyranny, and an instance in which the word has been used to refer to an enslaved person of African origin. Here are two examples that I found: 

Students should notice the transactional nature of an advertisement proposing the sale of a human being, and contrast it with the metaphoric and "patriotic" way that the word is deployed in the pro-Revolutionary poem. At the end of the exercise, teachers should shift to more open-ended questions about why the institution of slavery was able to persist and even grow in the context of the Revolution. 

We’d love to hear what documents worked for you in your classroom! Instructors and teachers can comment on this post with other ideas and questions.

More Teaching American History with NYPL Digital Collections:

• Childhood in America
• Reconstruction