MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Middle Tennessee State University welcomes acclaimed historian Janet Polasky for the Strickland Distinguished Scholar Lecture on Monday, Nov. 16, as she explores how the American Revolution ignited movements for liberty across four continents.

“This year’s Strickland Visiting Scholar, Janet Polasky, is one of the foremost scholars of the Age of Revolution in the English-speaking world,” said Lynn Nelson, MTSU history professor and chair of the lecture committee.

Polasky will present “The Call to Liberty: Echoes Heard Around the Atlantic World” at 7 p.m. Nov. 16, in the State Farm Lecture Hall, Room S102, of the Business and Aerospace Building, 1642 MTSU Blvd. A Q&A and book signing will follow the lecture. After-hours parking is free, and a searchable campus parking map is available at bit.ly/2026parkingmap.

Hosted by the MTSU Department of History and Strickland Distinguished Scholar Lecture Series, the event is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed via True Blue TV.

The revolutionary ideals weren’t bound by America’s shores but formed from a framework dating back generations to various governmental structures.

Ideals not bound by borders

“Understanding the American Revolution requires understanding that it was not an isolated event,” Nelson said. “Our own revolutionaries drew on a tradition of European republicanism that went back centuries.”

European republicanism is the belief that a nation should be run by its citizens and their chosen officials instead of a hereditary monarch.

“In turn, the ideas and institutions they created traveled back across the Atlantic, helping set off the French Revolution and popular uprisings against monarchy across Europe,” Nelson said.

Ideals and ideas sparked by the American Revolution eventually inspired the uprising of enslaved people in Haiti during the 1790s and independence movements throughout Central and South America in the early 1800s.

Polasky, presidential professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, will trace those revolutionary connections across four continents, exploring how ordinary people challenged empires, rejected monarchies and imagined a world built on freedom.

Her research examines how ideas about liberty traveled through unlikely places — from Caribbean plantations built on enslaved labor to European households influenced by Enlightenment thinkers.

Polasky is the author of “Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World” and “Asylum between Nations: Refugees in a Revolutionary Era,” which explore how people and revolutionary ideas crossed borders and oceans.

More than two centuries later, Polasky will examine whether the ideals of liberty that once echoed across the Atlantic still resonate today.

The lecture is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities‘ “Celebrate America!” initiative, which has helped fund MTSU’s yearlong commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary through the Honors College and American Democracy Project.

— Nancy DeGennaro ([email protected])