About our Expert

Eliga Gould is professor of history and chair of the History Department. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of early America, especially the American Revolution. He also offers classes in Atlantic history, the history of European expansion, and the Anglo-American right to bear arms.

The main focus of Professor Gould’s scholarship is the American Revolution, with an emphasis on the revolution’s “outer” history in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the wider world.  In Among the Powers of the Earth:  The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard, 2012), he explored the ways in which the American republic’s quest to be accepted as a “treaty worthy” nation by Europe’s colonial powers shaped American thinking about an array of issues, including federalism, Native American treaty rights, and the abolition of slavery.  The book has been widely praised, including on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page and by Noam Chomsky.  Named a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Among the Powers received the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.  A Japanese translation was published in 2016.His other publications include The Persistence of Empire:  British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution, Empire and Nation:  The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Peter S. Onuf, and numerous articles, book chapters, and review essays.

Professor Gould’s current book project, Crucible of Peace: 1783 and the Founding of the American Republic, examines the least studied of the United States’ founding documents:  the Treaty of 1783 that ended the American Revolutionary War. 

 Durham, New Hampshire eliga.gould@unh.edu Office:(603) 862-3012