1776 Across the Americas: A Hemispheric History from the Collections of the John Carter Brown Library

Join us on Friday, January 30, 2026 at 5 p.m. to celebrate the opening of the exhibition 1776 Across the Americas: A Hemispheric History from the Collections of the John Carter Brown Library.

Please note that registration is required. 

Please register at https://forms.gle/HpP6WVdspBpJrzjf8. 

About the exhibition

If 1776 seems like a legible year because of its significance for the American Revolution, in many ways it was also just another year. In Providence, Rhode Island, Nicholas Brown and his brothers in business were keeping accounts of the goods they were buying and selling around the Atlantic as well as right around the corner, and, like George Washington’s army, attending to their own and their families’ health through smallpox inoculation. English and French settlers in Canada grappled with the aftereffects of the recently
passed Quebec Act. In the Sonora region of Mexico, Pedro Font’s first published map of the San Francisco Bay was being prepared for publication. Men, women, and children across the Americas were working, feeding their families, preparing for the turning seasons, and attending to the business of everyday life.

The American Revolution was profound and consequential, and at the time declaring independence was a recognizably radical act. But it was also a result of a longish back and forth between Britain and its mainland North American colonies in which the full continent, Caribbean and South American contexts tangled. This exhibit asks what 1776 meant or simply what was paramount in that phenomenal year quite aside from what was happening in the new United States.

The John Carter Brown Library’s collections cannot represent a comprehensive or holistic perspective on 1776 in any one place, not least the full hemisphere. But the collections of the JCB provide a unique vantage on how largely printed materials– from books and pamphlets to broadsides and maps– were produced in that year and reflected diverse experiences. Throughout this exhibit, items of intimate and local consequence are juxtaposed with those of imperial, national and international significance and tell the story
of 1776 across the Americas through our remarkable collections.