
Michael A. Blaakman, Ph.D.
The Simcoes: Enemies of the American Revolution
Blaakman is an assistant professor of history and the David L. Rike University Preceptor at Princeton University. His first book, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023. At Mount Vernon, he will be working on a new project that traces the extraordinary lives of a globe-trotting British power couple, John Graves Simcoe and Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, to view the American Revolution and the republic it created through the eyes of some of its most persistent antagonists. Weaving the Simcoes’ story with those of the diverse people they encountered in North America and around the Atlantic world, the book will explore the many and sometimes contradictory reasons why people became enemies of the Revolution.