Rome and America: Edward Gibbon and the American Revolution

Join the American Philosophical Society and The British Academy on Tuesday, May 12, 2026 to welcome Dame Linda Colley for a lecture on “Rome and America: Edward Gibbon and the American Revolution.” 

Between 1776 and 1783, Edward Gibbon published the first three volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read by many of the Founding Fathers, they were quickly purchased for the use of Congress and became best-sellers in the new United States. Despite this, and although Gibbon was a Member of Parliament during the Revolutionary War, he is now often represented as essentially a detached and conservative figure with no real interest in events in America. In this lecture, Linda Colley discusses the Revolution's impact on his ideas and on his history-writing, and what he meant in claiming that, “The decline of the two empires, the Roman and the British” was advancing “with equal steps.”

This event, featuring Linda Colley, a Fellow of The British Academy, is a collaboration of the APS and The British Academy and is part of a series of programs featuring international exchange of learned academies. While the APS is the oldest learned society in the United States, promoting useful knowledge in all fields, The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and society sciences. They mobilise these disciplines to understand the world and shape a brighter future. Much like the APS, the Academy invests in researchers and projects, engages the public with fresh thinking and debates, and brings together scholars, government, business, and civil society to influence policy for the benefit of everyone. Moreover, like the APS’s elected Members, at the heart of the Academy is a Fellowship of more than 1,800 academics elected for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The Fellows play an active role in the Academy’s governance and support their work through involvement in events, awards, publications, and policy programs.

Dame Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University, is an expert on British imperial and global history since 1700. Born in Britain, she graduated from Bristol University with First Class Honors in history, and completed her Ph.D. in history at Cambridge University. The first female Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, she moved to Yale University in 1982. Colley is author of a number of influential and award-winning books including In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714-1760 (1982), Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992), Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 (2002), The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2007), Acts of Union and Disunion (2014), and The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021). She is currently working on a global history of Edward Gibbon and his work.

In 1999, Colley was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Academia Europaea, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009, she was awarded a C.B.E. In 2022, Colley received the Order of the British Empire: DBE (Dame of the Order of the British Empire) as part of her majesty, Queen Elizabeth II's, platinum jubilee birthday honours. She holds eight honorary degrees. In 2025, Colley received Princeton University's Howard T. Berhman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.