i want to get us started with a background on the loyalists and can you give us a brief background on the people who identified as loyalists what their lives look like leading up to and during the revolution and what happened to them after the war patrick. do you want to start us off on this? error and gina. thanks for having us. so i i see there's being kind of three basic categories of loyalists. there are people who really just wanted to remain neutral in the war. but because they were trading in violation of nonprotation or selling livestock to the british. they were there. retarded as well a lot of the native americans wanted to stay out of the war, but they got sucked into it. there were some religious groups like quakers and mennonites who were opposed to war in principle and were often seen as deciding with the british. they were also loyalists who some of them who were believed in tory principles of obeying the king no matter what and that resistance to to lawful authority was a christian sin and there was some these are like hydrogen clergy, but there was a small group i think most loyalists were people who held the same wake principles of constitutional liberty as the patriots. did they just thought that that the violence of the sons of liberty? here the oppressiveness of not interpretation was a greater threat to constitutional liberty than crowned in parliament, and i guess we'll we'll see toyota discussion day what happens these folks folks they have very different destinies. and susie, do you have anything to add to that that you'd like to share just one of the when you when you sort of come back 10,000 feet and you look at the the percentages a lot of loyalists who didn't have the wherewithal to kind of take a stand. is as patrick said just sort of remained neutral they might have had an opinion, but they didn't say anything because it meant risking too much and that sort of the you know, the middling and lower classes of folks who were really more concerned about just making a living. i think let's go a little deeper with this and i want to pass this one to eileen to start loyalists have a wide range of backgrounds motivations and expressions of sympathy for great britain. what were their motivations for harboring pro-british sentiment? and what were the consequences of that in their daily lives? was it just as simple as we're british? well, i mean, i think it's true that the loyalists were pro-british but i think and this ties in a little bit. patrick was saying about how the loyalists shared a lot of the same principles as the revolutionaries that i think to say. oh the loyalists were probritish and the revolutionaries were pro-american doesn't really capture the complexities of the loyalties back then that on the one hand the revolutionaries were very much pro british themselves until 1775 1776, you know, they were protesting all these british taxes, but it was on the basis that they thought of themselves as british citizens and they thought they weren't being treated as equal british citizens and then on the other side the loyalists i all they were loyal to britain. they also saw themselves as true americans and but they what they believed and i think this is what really separates them in the end from the revolutionaries. is that when it comes time for war in an independence that that whatever problems they had with british policies. they thought war would be just too destructive that they didn't think they could win against the british or even if they did and became independent that france or spain would just take over and they felt that americans were better off under british rule trying to achieve reform within the system and trying to survive with outside that system. we just got a really great question in the chat right off the bat. thank you michael for this one. we're loyalists called loyalists at the time or is that a more modern term? i we should definitely talk about this, you know in terms of our vocabulary as we keep going what did people refer to loyola status in in the era. i think it depended on who you are i think for the revolutionaries they call the loyalist tories and kind of distigmatize them and make them make it seem like oh they were just pro monarchy. i think the loyalists do start adopting the term loyalist for themselves. i think sometimes starting around 1774. so yeah, i think from their perspective they did see themselves as loyalist, but they were not seen as that by the revolutionaries. that's that's really interesting. does anybody else want to jump in on that kind of background about about the lowest patrick? absolutely. yeah. i just wanted to to echo eileen here one of the ones that massachusetts loyalist daniel leonard rose in attacking john adams said, you know, well you guys call us tories. well if notorious someone who believes that the majority shouldn't be allowed to do whatever they want to then call me a tory right so he kind of own the word. i i just want to concur that i for me the problem is less explaining why some american's being able to written about why some americans didn't write because you know through the 1760 70s the the american colonists were enormously proud of being british and this is true of not just simply, you know, or scottish and they resisted parliamentary act. so they saw as i constitutional in the british constitution right and even when new england militia took up arms and 775 they saw them. so i'll just it took inspiration for the memory of the english civil war in southern cells as being like their british forbear estate. depending up against trolls the further the american revolution initially was kind of they saw it as a continued the patriot side as a continuation of that preventionary tradition. patrick let's let's kind of stay on this topic with you a little bit more about the tragedy of the loyalists if you will thomas hutchinson great example of a really maligned figure right after being forced to evacuate. he spent the rest of his life in england. hoping to come home to america but unable to do so, so this is a really interesting tragedy people born in america true early american citizens, right who had feelings about the british constitution and and their own government. we're forced to flee because of their political affiliation. so what happened to those people, did they become refugees where we're expat communities created? can you feel that for us a little bit patrick? or a lot of loyalists did become refugees. this is particularly true in new england where they were very much outnumbered unlike say in parts of new yorker or the south and when the british evacuated boston they took about 3,000 loyalists with them these folks went to new england some of them stayed in sorry, nova scotia. some state never scott other wireless particularly from new york ultimately settled in ontario a lot of these doing in refugees relocated to london became a little expat community there and then some loyalists were were enslaved people who were liberated by the british army and and were found new lives in canada and and some of those folks eventually would create a colony of free people and west africa could sierra leone and then there were some some loyalists who did return to the colonies to the states of this at this point and and in some cases successfully sued to regain confiscated property alexander hamilton actually represented a lot of these people in new york and and and in many cases they were assimilated into americans society. this is less true in new england the new york in the south where there's larger numbers of artists to begin with but not all of them have the same kind of trag. section thanks, patrick susie. do you want to add to that? well, actually, so i thought that was really interesting that alexander hamilton worked on behalf of many of the ones who? who were coming back and there's a wonderful story about john adams reuniting with his friend jonathan seward and they had their friendship had really broken up over the revolutionary war and then when it was over they saw each other and just gave each other a big hug at one point. i can't remember now whether this was well adams was in the uk or whether it was back on home ground, but you know, they there are these bonds of friendship and love and family that sometimes just you know, we're only temporarily broken by the revolution. it it is emotional when you start to think about it, really? talking us about you know that tension the tension of bonds. i want to get into the tension between the bond of breaking preservation and erasure and and that that tension right there and i want to start off with with eileen for this one to kind of address the tension between the preservation and erasure of the loyalists in american history how have loyalist writers and historians from the era been perceived from their time of writing to today has our perception of these storytellers changed over time does lifting loyalist stories give a broader perspective of america's biography. um, well, yeah, i think there's been a lot of change and i think in terms of how modern scholars have seen them i think modern scholars i think have could have portrayed these loyalists and writers and historians as almost double losers in a sense of both losing in the sense of just being defeated in the revolution and also losing in the struggle over historical memory in the sense that they were forgotten and also failed to produce a powerful counter narrative that could compete with the patriotic narratives that were being produced by the revolutionaries. um, and i think that is true to some extent but what's actually interesting is if you go back to the time of the revolution itself in the years immediately afterwards and you look at american nationalist writers who were very pro-revolutionary who are trying to promote a sense of nationalism. they were actually very ambivalent about these loyalist historians on the one hand. they were disparaging of these loyalist historians and you know said, oh, you know, they're prejudice they're pro-british on the other hand. these nationals writers are plagiarizing and copying from these loyalist historians for their own histories. and what they do is they copy them but in a selective way and then twist these loyalist histories to use them to justify the revolution and promote a sense of american nationalism and a sense of american exceptionalism. so i think the reason why it is important to learn more about these loyalist historians is in many ways, they play an important role in shaping this narrative of american exceptionalism that i think we still have with us today. do you do you feel that and this is just jumping off one of our prep questions here. do you feel that that today the general vibe in the historical community is more empathy towards loyalist historians than we've previously given in previous generations. definitely. i mean, i think that's been one major change. i think that and i think that for a long time. yeah, the loyalists have just been kind of forgotten and vilified and i think starting the late 20th century there was starting to be some interest by modern historians in them and i think in the last 10 to 20 years that's been really a revival and a kind of resurgence of interest in the loyalists amongst historians. i'm not sure that that's reached to the larger public though. yeah. yeah. i mean i will say, you know, i am i i am not a historian and and learning about this was fascinating to me just the change of perception of this. so if i am representative of the general public, it's it's very very interesting. i want to i want to send this off to just susie and patrick as well. how do you feel that the historical memory of the loyalists either helped create a sense of american nationalism a sense of exceptionalism. what are your thoughts on that? yeah again. agree with with eileen that developed some played a role in defining a sense of american exceptionism. i think that precisely because the american colonists american revolutionaries did were so culturally british. they needed a way to define written once they're an independent country and they did this lesson terms of of culture than ideology rights. they said that what makes you american is that you believe in republicanism the with us people who believed in monarchy so to be american is to is to believe that the people should govern and and this makes us in the world. so that then when you had party conflict in 1790s between the federalists and the democratic republicans the democrat republicans would call the federalist tories as a way of saying you don't really believe in the people, right? so this becomes a smear a word and this is really holds i think into the 20th century one of the things that helped i think change at least among scholars a review of the loyalists is a increasing interest in the late 20th century and the history of of native americans and african-americans people of color because they face very stark choices about whose side they were going to be on and we've kind of recovered the importance of the contributions that people have the revolution but looking at those native americans who did slide with the british as the best way of preserving their land claims or the african slate after americans who who did run the british lines and even take up arms and their behalf as the best way of attaining their freedom. so this would change of interest beyond just you know, what what you know white americans did is i think helped us to have more sympathy for the loyal's perspective. susie do you have anything you'd want to jump on and add to that as the steward of a loyalist monument? is it worth? uh, well, so i would pick up what eileen mentioned and that was that you know the sort of the scholars are looking at the loyalist histories, but in terms of the history that we do at the shirley eustis house, we're kind of taking a different attack, but we're not we haven't been looking so much at the histories that loyalists wrote, you know, so i had to do a little bit of research on that and the historiography of the loyalists and how that worked. in preparing for this presentation. it was kind of a sort of like it's always been in the background for me. so i think that's an interesting take on it and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the future. how we how these loyalists histories become more part of the sort of regular knowledge of history fans, i guess. well, i think big part part of it right is is being aware of places like the shirley eustis house and being aware of of loyalist monuments and what happened to those monuments, so i wouldn't pivot to patrick on on this one to start after the revolution monuments were removed and places were renamed king george's statue for example was toppled in new york when the declaration of independence was read and in massachusetts hutchinson, massachusetts was renamed bar, massachusetts after a british parliamentarian who was perceived as a better friend of the colony has been hutchinson. so is this wedding an american precedent. how can we relate these actions to the removal of statues today statues and monuments at the community does not feel represents the stories and heroes we wish to celebrate. sure. yeah, it's in the beginning of the war. it wasn't clearly an anti-british phenomenon. and then the cushion and penets you have this this case these soldiers and sailors dashing down to the equestrian statue of the king and in downtown new york city pulling it down and not just putting it down, but they cut off the king's head and then they fire him musketball into the head, right? so this is a symbolic religious side, right? this is the closest they can get to executing king and trying to make a break between our british past and some kind of new american past and every time that a people kind of collectively agrees. we need to reinvent ourselves, right we need to to we we conceive of ourselves as a community you kind of need. those sort of symbolic acts of iconoclasm. so as you mentioned there were in the revolution there were renamings the king's college becomes columbia university. you have coats of arms that are pulled down and burned and replaced with new state state arms, and it's a we can we can look to this revolutionary experience as a president for what's going on today and as americans kind of reef think their history and accordingly, we think their identity. it's a i think it's it's necessary for us to not just revise our public memory but to revise our landscape which is way of of make in our people around us. so it's i would add that that george washington was very upset when the soldiers pull down the statue because they did it without the without approval and this is kind of one of the big conflicts we had today of well if it is okay to remove monuments on what terms should we do this, right? is it okay to do what happened, you know with the soldier sellers doing it on their own pulling it down or is there a legal process that we need to go through but i guess for us saying that the will the people should support nate to the rule of law. i'm probably sound like a story at this point so i should shut up susie. thank you at a story about this that you wanted to. yeah, so well i'm speaking to to patrick's comment about the the destruction of the equestrian statue of the king. of course, you know the american conflict or the american sort of people when they were asked about a frequently we're like, well, we love the king, right? we love the king and of course american still have love affair with the british monarchy. as a symbolic piece that was tremendously upsetting for a lot of people right because they still even though they've never met the king and would never met the king meet the king. they still had these warm personal feelings for this, you know father figure which in british culture had a thousand year history of you know, we our king is our our you know father so and that's a hot, you know, no revolution has ever complete right you you can do these symbolic things and then you draw back. the one that always in this sort of discussion about the destruction monuments the one that always strikes me is the destruction of the monument of the soldier. who was the father of alexander dumas in france, and he the father of alexander. jama was a black man born of an enslaved woman in dominica and french nobleman, and he was brought to france in the 1700s and educated like a young white frenchman. he was free because he was on french soil. he he rises to the military ranks he fights in the revolution. he becomes one of napoleon's most effective and revered generals, but as he rises to the ranks napoleon grows to really hate him and you know napoleon is the one who puts in the prison for several years. fast forward a hundred years. there's a statue of him erected. so he's a black man, but he fights you know, he he fights for the brutality of the napoleonic armies the nazis come through france. they see his statute and because he's a black man. they destroy it right. so there's all these complexities that feed into it, but when we look at statues and monuments, we really only ever see the most simple symbolic stories right and when we make these symbols we can we always end up removing the complexity from them. and so these symbols are always going to be subject to the reinterpretation of you know emotion. oh, i want to deep dive really into the complexity of the shirley eustis house itself of which you the executive director. so it wasn't destroyed as a monumentalism but rather it was appropriated by american troops and later hosted extremely pro-american ceremonies like a celebration for the 1824 return tour of lafayette a major event in nationalism and historic memory of the revolution for early americans. so, how do we today evaluate the historical significance of the house itself? is it a loyalist monument meant to communicate the enduring legacy of loyalists or a space that's significant because it was reinterpreted and occupied by leading figures in american politics of the 18th century. um, so we actually although we talk about both of those things. we kind of do neither in our in our interpretation. so what we do is we we have developed our story in response to the architecture of the building and to what the building represents and it is the it is an english british country house in america. it's a high palladian architectural style. it was the type favored by born and bred brits like governor shirley. it was not a colonial country house. and so and because he was the governor we interpret the house and the lives of the governor and his family as as sort of representations of the british empire and we talk about the legacy of the british empire that the house represents in sort of three ways one is that you know any empire but in our terms it's the british empire captured, you know conquered both land and people and exploited them they so we can talk about the slave trade and the british role in the slave trade in the 18th century we can talk about british imperialisms conquest of natural resources, so you can start with the fur trade in new england and then move to the timber trade and so there's that sort of piece of imperialism which later just sort of, you know, both of these things perpetuate through american culture right in a particularly or the legacy of these things in america is british, and then the other thing that we can talk about in terms of sort of what the british empire represents and it's imprint on american culture is our our sort of persistent problem with wealth inequity, right because the british poor laws were very much the imprint for the way we deal with poverty in america today. so on some level we actually talk about the continuities there and i'll give you just one quick example because i realize that was not sort of pretty abstract description before but for example governor shirley the royal governor in the 1740s was referred to as your excellency, right? we would never call a governor today in america. ditto for governor eustis the democratic republican governor of the commonwealth of massachusetts after the revolutionary war as late as 1825 massachusetts. governor is still being called your excellency. what that represents is this true this this continuity of british identity culture food politics religion literature that persists in america as we for many years as we try to find this, you know national this new national national identity. and so those other three subjects that i talked about before there, you know part and parcel of any empire but in america, they they have a particularly british origin story. that is that is so so that that's how we talk about the show used to sell. so those loyalists and patriot only kind of you know. swim through that larger current. i just want to jump in we had some questions in the chat that are that are it's a it's a great discussion about the line in the unicorn being taken down. i did not know this, but they were evidently also taken down in the pennsylvania state house, but to to my first susan susan l asking if they were removed from the old state house in boston, they were they were removed. however, they were put back and i believe the 1870s i have been told and to to get the building to it's it's original state. however, there was public backlash at the time so when they reinstalled the lion in the unicorn at the old state house in boston, they also installed a an eagle as well so that that tension is there in in our space as well. so so and i believe they were they were replaced. i i want to say the 1870s, but don't hold me to it. what you should do is come into our space and take a tour and our our brilliant interpretation to you will take you through and point it out to you. um, i i do not deep dive a little more into the monuments just in general and and patrick. i think i want to pass this to you first. why were some monuments and properties or artifacts decimated and others reappropriated generally? um a lot of the reasons for iconoclasm was symbolic to show that shift in allegiance and a change of regime. this is one reasons why that that the statue of the king was taken down in new york, but they're also practical calculations. i mean the shirley house was was useful to the american army the william vestal housing cambridge, you know became command center for the kind of army when it was located in cambridge during the siege of boston one of the reasons why the the new york money was taking down wasn't just oh we wouldn't have this this proxy as murder of the king execution the king but it's it's 4,000 pounds of lead in the hands of an army. that was absolutely start for ammunition. and she gets a foundry and melted it down to 42,000 musketballs and then fired as they put it melted majesty back at the british army. so a lot of these questions of what what aspects of the old british regime were preserved and what were were torn down had just some degree to do with with symbolic cultural considerations, but also practical calculations and i i agree with susie that americans typically hold on to british culture, but they do they re-adapt it just like with the surely house, you know, we were singing god save the king now, we just keep the tone and we we sing my country tis of the right saying same melody and there are speaking of restoring the line in the unicorn there is there's some proposals with that empty pedestal in new york to the king statue. as a form of historic restoration and and that is not that is not go over. so there's there's limits to i think how much americans are willing to hold on to their their material british heritage as part of historic memory, but practicals will symbolic inspiration. are coming to play. susie do you have anything that you'd like to add on to that? well with respect to preservation, right? so in terms of these historic houses and the longfellow houses one and the lauren grenow houses another with these isobro house enslaved quarters all loyalist houses that were preserved because people generally said, you know, well, he's not there anymore, but it's a nice house. i'd like that house right and and in the surely house, for example, where in the entire neighborhood was sort of destroyed at one point. the house itself is made of such heavy timbers. it's so stoutly built that it was more expensive to you know, sort of tear it down than it was to actually just pick it up and move it across the street at one point. uh, because it was a nice house, right? and so at some point it's it doesn't really matter. that it was a loyalist house and in that and in fact, it becomes sort of a curiosity and eileen. i'm gonna i'm gonna pop this one over to you did his storians preserve and erase loyalists in the same way monuments and material cultured it. yeah, i think that's a really interesting comparison. and yeah, i mean, i think especially when you look at what i was saying about how these early american nationals historians were copying and plagiarizing from loyalist historians and then converting what they were taking from these loyalist historians into a nationalist message. i think it is very similar to what americans were doing with places like the shirley house in a way you could say these american nationalists historians were occupying the words of the loyalist historians in the way that americans were occupying these houses and again and and similar to i think both what patrick and susie were saying the fact that they are so dependent on these loyalists texts to construct their national's message shows that persisting influence and connection to britain and the way they're reading that connection to serve to create a distinctive sense of american identity. susie do you have anything you want to add to that? well, i think just one of the things is that as we go forward is as you know for me a public historian and for patrick and eileen is scholars, what's really exciting? is this looking setting aside the black and the white and a good guy in the bad guy and just looking at the continuities that help us define who we are as a people because i think that's what most people who visit the shirley used as house. come away with is a sense that their history as that they've that they've enriched their knowledge of their identity their historical identity as an american right and what that means so it becomes a subtle story good guys bad guys, black and white question in the chat that we're getting um for people who who want, you know experience a monument to the loyalists. what other loyalist houses besides the longfellow house are open today k has asked. so i would say the royal house enslaved quarters in medford is just an amazing site and and again the lauren grinnell house in jamaica plain. is a good one and i can't think of any others at the moment, but there's a they can reach out to me because they're actually is a it was a we have a brochure. that's that sort of talks about the tory trail and so you can visit a bunch of tori houses in new england and i can actually send a copy of that to whoever wants to reach out to me at the used to house. it's telling that we're we're strained to think of any loyalist landmarks. right and this is this. this is make sure that we're talking about i would maybe suggest like for ticonderoga which like the shirley house was a you know, a british site that is re-adapted as an american site and the the curatorial staff. there is really really dedicated to telling the story of the british army and not just the americans so who occupied it and and turned it around and and the the role of french and the native americans as well. so they're they're curators out there that are trying to to recover those lost loyalist stories that are kind of buried under our our long-standing patriot boost tourism. and also susan l has suggested king's chapel still has a place for the royal governor to sit and marl pitt hall in middletown, new jersey in monmouth county it was also a chat suggestion, too. thank you. thank you our chat participants and but i want to zoom back out and and bring us kind of now now into where we stand today. so rather than thinking of the loyalists as i think, you know, you learn an elementary school here were the good guys. it was the revolutionaries and here was the bad guys. it was the loyalist rather than thinking of them as villains in the story of how america came to be how might we present them in a fairer and more nuanced way to students and the general public i guess what i would say is. that i would say one way to do that is to acknowledge that like the revolutionaries the loyalists were americans to and to make people recognize that the revolution is not just a war of independence by americans against the british but that it's also a civil war between americans and between americans who shared me many of the same values. patrick do you have anything to add to that? yeah, i i would say that in so far as there's a tradition america of conscientious objection and resistance to the draft that people who hold those those views in america today and in recent history can look to people like the quakers and i sue were who were in a really a terrible position of their their we preventing the from being a particularly against us and in terms of those loyalists who were, you know, held wig principles and cited with the crown. i'd say that that what they were saying was that there needed to be the rule of law often requires some check. i'm a majority will and this remains part of the american tradition. it becomes integral to the us constitution and and is central to our politics this day if we just kind of step back and say oh wait a minute. you know what the loyalists never went away, right tradition is is really central to the american tradition that i think will will understand the loyalists of the revolutionary era and a different light. susie do you have anything to round us out on that idea? well, yes, i would say definitely visit the homes of the loyalists because you'll be not only sort of learning that history kind of upfront and you know environmentally, but you'll be supporting some really wonderful institutions that are doing a lot of work to preserve our local and national history and to preserve our story in all its complexity. i'm gonna pull a fantastic question out of the chat. i love this. it's benjamin a says. where does the study of loyalism go from here? what if possible new avenues? would you like to see the study study of loyalism go down? there's been some really good recent research on on the so called ordinary people who become loyalists. i mean the you know that the thomas hutchinson's or william franklin's are well known but as we as historians become more appreciative of the role of ordinary people so called and in history, i think there's more tension on those those folks who didn't there was an earlier kind of narrative that the loyalists were were the aristocrats. they were the big land holdings. they were the rich merchants and this is going to class war right? they were driven out, you know score one for for the the common man, but there were plenty of common people who who remain loyalist and suffered terribly and as a result of that and there's stories i think are being told but need to be told more and particularly in the case of of african-americans and native americans who have less documented lives. susie i saw you had something to add to that as well. oh, i think it would be interesting too. i was that's i was sort of patrick. sort of took the wind out of my sail i guess but i think it's been interesting as i sort of continue to read in this area also is to look at and this isn't looking at the loyalists exactly but the the british sailors and soldiers were essentially considered. you know expendable people right and they were frequently there are a lot of complaints not only from americans in the sort of being occupied but also from british the british gentry about how rough the the british regular the soldiers are right and how they're just destructive their their you know, because they're paid very very poorly the navy and and the british, you know, sort of generals. they really are considered expendable people. and so i think that's a that's something that hasn't been sort of cut out. i think a lot and talked about in, you know, sort of bigger picture of the revolutionary war and what these men thought you know and how they experienced it. that's that's fascinating that they're there to fight on behalf of the king, but mostly they don't care they you know they just want to eat right right. well going on what you just said that you've been reading up, you know as as you've encountered in in your reading we got another question from alan w in the chat. what books would our panelists recommend if somebody wants to read more about loyalist history, um liberty tax house by my chance to know i think i saw pop up in the chat some older literature like balance or deal with thomas hutchinson or william allen. benton's wig loyalists is helped to frame my understanding of loyalism as a graduate student, but there's a lot of a lot of good new literature and i would suggest reading reading's book too, but it look like for yourself there eileen. also one book that that's a relatively new book and i think this ties in also to these issue of kind of new directions with loyalists as something that we haven't talked much about is the issue of women loyalists and there is one new book by casey tillman about women loyalists, but i think that's an area where much more could be done because i think you know being a woman at that time, you know women you married women at the time. we're not given any kind of political rights or political identity of their own. so i think that gets us into all kinds of interesting questions as you know, what does it mean for a woman to be a loyalist or can a woman even be a loyalist if she's not being allowed political choices? so i think that's something that you know could be worthy of more study. and i think that book by casey tillman addresses some of these issues. the channel butter also wrote on unloyless swimming, but i may be maybe maybe mistaken with the chance of potter. yes, right. yes. yeah, i eileen your your book is is the one that patrick is referring to the the plain and noble garb of truth, or do you have another one that's coming out well. in one chapter about the loyalists. yeah, it's really i think the one that i'm working on is the one that's more focused on lawyers, but it's not done yet. so well as soon as it's done and we get that that info we will we will send it out to to folks if they're interested and gosh you guys in the chat you are giving us such amazing amazing questions, and i think this is just it might be a hard one to answer and i know we only have a few hot seconds before i have my last question for our panelists, but alan w coming back at you with a great one. this is the juicy. what do you think the psychological effect was on the loyalists from being banished to the colonies? does anybody have a thought about that with that but that narrative would look like i don't think that there is a single narrative which is why i think it's hard to answer. i'm i think that loyalists really varied in terms of how they dealt with being banished. so for example, you know, you mentioned thomas hutchinson. i think he really suffered. he was never really happy in england. he always wanted to go home. he spent all his time trying to justify what he did. and so i think it did have a really a detrimental psychological effect on him to be banished like that because he felt like he had lost his home, but i think my jazz enough's book that was mentioned. she talks a lot about how a lot of these loyalists are quite resilient and find ways to adapt to being exiled and find new lies and actually take some of the ideas that we consider american and take them into these other areas on spread them to the rest of the british empire. you know, i would agree. i think that there were. though a lot of loyalists to relocate from say new york and, new jersey to canada took enormous pride in themselves as being we're the ones who remain true, you know, we kept our o's and at this day there are a lot of people in ontario who pride themselves for being the descendants of united empire loyalists. it's actually i think a big part of anglo-canadian identity. we were we were the north americans who weren't jerks right as it can how they see it and and from other people the perspective other people like for instance enslaved people the removal from north from from what becomes the united states is is not a is not necessarily a trauma. it's it's literal liberation physical and spiritual liberation and the chance to to start in a life not to say that it's it's going to be easy for them. well, i went around us out on our closing question because it's it's a big one. what about the loyalists haven't we talked about that people should know that so many of them just are things i said at the beginning kind of melted into the woodwork right? they didn't have the wherewithal to speak out in their little communities a lot of them. for example the minister in hingham in that time very well respected man was able to sort of toe the line right between his his parishioners who were patriots and those who were loyalists and because he was such a respected man in the community. he was left alone, and i think that story you know community bonds sometimes overrode the larger political considerations. and so, you know that history gets lost i think well, i guess what i would and we sort of alluded to this, but i guess i would want to put more emphasis on this is just the way that the loyalists were treated, you know, we've talked about you know, they were exiled their property was confiscated. but in fact they were mistreated in all kinds of much more severe ways. i mean they were tard and feathered they were tortured and all kinds of cruel ways. and i think it's important to bear that in mind because i think it to understand more about the loyalists is to understand more about the revolutionaries and to see some of the limitations of the revolutionaries and i think that's another reason why it's important to recover the story of the loyalists. yeah, i i would just have to to agree with susie and eileen susie alluded to ebenezer gay and hingham and he was one of the few who managed to negotiate this conflict, but there were the references clergy men who were were terribly mistreated and lost everything and they and were faced with you know, beatings or torture and they they absolutely refuse to give in and as you know as americans in a republic we see them as the bad guys, but they're there stories of extraordinary moral courage that i think need to be told and you know as as kind of symbols of dissent when sometimes the majority is wrong you may we should recover the stories and tell them even see them and increase ways american heroes. well just recently reading mark peterson's book the city state of boston and he actually starts to reformulate a little bit to push back on some of the histories of some of the patriots. so sam adams and his book comes out as as. kind of a thug, you know and he arranges for sort of come some of these awful things to happen to some else so, you know it's kind of given take we are at the end of our time today and there is there is still so much more to talk about. thank you guys so much and i hope to see you back here soon. thank you everyone. every spring thousands of people visit the washington dc title basin to see the cherry blossoms memorials to thomas jefferson franklin d roosevelt and martin luther king jr. stand on its banks the title basin started as an engineering project but is also served as a swimming hole a protest ground and the scene of a political scandal. mike littest national mall and memorial parks communications chief met us on site to talk about the area's history and famous japanese cherry trees. we are at the end of the title basin in washington dc home to the world famous cherry trees which blossom every spring well-known to washingtonians people across the country and in fact people across the world, but had you been here before about 1890 or so, we would be in the middle of the potomac river. you can watch this and other american artifacts programs by visiting our website cspan.org/history. weekends on c-span 2 are an intellectual feast every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sundays book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors funding for c-span 2 comes from these television companies and more including cox. cox is committed to providing eligible families access to affordable internet through the connect to compete program bridging the digital divide one connected and engaged student at a time cox bringing us closer cox along with these television companies support c-span, 2 as a public service. this week we're looking back to this date in history. i want to begin by saying that. hillary and i are profoundly. shocked and saddened by the tragedy today in littleton. we're two students opened fire on their classmates. before apparently turning their guns on themselves. i have spoken with governor bill owens and county commission chair, patricia holloway. and expressed my profound concern for the people of littleton. i have spoken to deputy attorney general eric holder. and who along with the attorney general reno is? closely monitoring the situation i've asked the attorney general and the secretary of education. to stand ready to assist local law enforcement the schools. the families the entire community during this time of crisis and sorrow a crisis response team is ready now to travel to, colorado. and i strongly believe that we should do whatever we can. to get enough counselors to the families and the children. as quickly as possible. i know the other communities that have been through this are also ready to do whatever they can to help. i think that. patricia holloway would not mind if i said that amidst all the turmoil and grief that she and others are experiencing. she said to me just a moment ago that perhaps now america would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge. if it could happen in a place like littleton. and we could prevent anything like this from happening again. follow us on social media at cspan history for more this date tory posts. well, good evening. everybody. welcome to tonight's presentation on charlie chaplin who is known universally as an iconic comedian. what is not so generally known perhaps is the political impact of his humor. a subject about which we will learn more this evening. first let me thank our series sponsor davenport company not only for theirup