Date of Award
5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
History
Committee Chair/Advisor
Lee Wilson
Committee Member
Joshua Catalano
Committee Member
Amanda Regan
Abstract
Historians of the American Revolution have frequently viewed terms such as tyranny as a stable ideological category, associated with corruption and resistance to arbitrary power. This thesis instead reconceptualizes ‘tyranny’ as an evolving and historically contingent Koselleckian concept. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of the New Hampshire Gazette from 1756 to 1783, this study combines close reading with computational methods, including word frequency analysis and word embeddings, to chart the evolution of the semantic field surrounding “tyranny” over time.
Prior to the Stamp Act of 1765, ‘tyranny’ was used primarily in a religious and moral framework which was shaped by anti-Catholicism and the experiential context of the Seven Years’ War. Colonists used ‘tyranny’ as a way to express moral anxieties and existential fears of Catholic domination. Following the imperial crisis of the 1760s, however, ‘tyranny’ experienced a conceptual reconstitution in which the term was expanded to encompass new political contexts and reoriented towards the colonists’ steadily accumulating political experience. It became a diagnostic tool through which colonists interpreted the imperial system and their own political condition.
By tracing this semantic transformation, this thesis argues that political language did not merely reflect colonial political consciousness but actively structured it. As ‘tyranny’ accumulated new meanings grounded in lived experience, it shaped colonists’ expectations of the future and contributed to the emergence of a political consciousness in which revolution became conceivable. Ultimately, this study demonstrates the value of integrating conceptual history with computational text analysis to better understand the dynamic relationship between language and political thought in the age of the American Revolution.
Recommended Citation
Worley, Antonio, "“Tyranny” as Concept: Semantic Change and the Formation of Colonial Political Consciousness in the New Hampshire Gazette, 1756–1783" (2026). All Theses. 4756.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_theses/4756
Comments
The scraping scripts, preprocessing pipelines, and word embedding models used in this study are available at:
https://github.com/atworle/nhgazettethesis
An interactive Shiny application built from the same corpus is available at:
https://atworle.shinyapps.io/nh-gazette-semantic-explorer/
The source code for the application is available at:
https://github.com/atworle/nhgazetteshinyapp