Since 2004, the Department of History at Northern Illinois University (NIU) has hosted an annual lecture series to honor former history professor W. Bruce Lincoln.
Professor Lincoln, a leading expert on Russian history, taught at NIU from 1967 to 1999. The W. Bruce Lincoln Endowed Lecture Series is designed to reflect Lincoln’s commitment to making history accessible and relevant.
Every year, NIU welcomes a distinguished scholar to present and discuss topics that are considered relevant to academia and the public.
This year’s speaker was Richard Bell, a Cambridge and Harvard-educated history professor at the University of Maryland specializing in American history from 1750 to 1877.
Bell has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress.
He is also the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
He has authored four books, including his latest released last year, entitled “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.”
On Tuesday evening, Sept. 29, Bell gave his lecture “Globalizing the American Revolution” to a crowd of students, academics, and the public in Altgeld Hall’s auditorium.
The lecture served as an exploration of the international consequences wrought by the American Revolution.
By repositioning the conflict, communities and nations across Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas were woven into the fold.
The war’s global outreach was explored through disruptions to trade networks, naval campaigns, personal displacements, and foreign alliances.
“Despite our K-12 teacher’s best efforts,” said Bell, “popular culture here in the U.S. has taught all of us who live here a shrunken and sanitized version of the American Revolution. Generations of Americans have grown up seeing the revolution not as a part of world history, but as an exception to it — a story apart, rather than what it was: a story among. I think that the truth is much more complicated and much more interesting than the myth.”
At the end of the lecture, Bell fielded questions from the crowd on primary sources, the role of class and human rights, Sierra Leone, and the war’s impact on the British Empire.
