Honor Sachs
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Cullowhee, NC 28723)
FT-255126-17
Summer Stipends
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$6,000 (approved)
$6,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
6/1/2017 – 7/31/2017
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The Life of Bartholomew Fenton: A Story of Revolution, Transformation, and Violence in Early America
A book-length study about the rags-to-riches
story of Bartholomew Fenton, whose life encompassed many of the complications
of the American Revolution and early republican era.
This project follows the life of a man named Bartholomew Fenton in his passage through the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolution. Fenton was exiled from London in 1770 as a convict servant and transported to colonial Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution. When war broke out, he took up arms against the empire that banished him and made his way to Kentucky. There he forged new status fighting Indians in the frontier militia. He acquired land and slaves, and in 1792, Fenton was arrested a second time for brutally beating a female slave to death. Arrested and tried for murder, Fenton was acquitted on all charges. This book reconstructs Fenton's journey from London to colonial Virginia to early national Kentucky and traces the complex ways that violence, race, and status were historically contingent in the vast Atlantic upheavals of the late eighteenth century.
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