Maya Jasanoff at Washington College
History, as we know, is most often told by the victors. In Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011), Harvard University history professor Maya Jasanoff, winner of the 2012 George Washington Book Prize, reverses the trend, tracing the stories of Americans loyal to the English crown and their forced exodus at the end of the American Revolution. “Losers seldom get to write thehistory, but the American loyalists have at last got their historian with Maya Jasanoff,” says historian Joseph J. Ellis, while Sean Wilentz says that her “stunning reinterpretation … affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation.” Jasanoff is also author of the critically acclaimed Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850.

