By Michelle Orihel 

When I was looking for something to watch last summer, I stumbled on a clip from Outlander. A woman in eighteenth-century dress walks along the road. She is distressed. A car pulls up and the driver gets out to help. It’s 1948. “Who won… who won the battle of Culloden… tell me… tell me, who won the battle of Culloden?,” she frantically asks the driver “The British… Cumberland and the British,” the driver shouts. The woman  falls to the ground and sobs. She breaks down with such intensity that I thought— if a question about a battle that took place in 1746 Scotland is so urgent, I must watch the series. 

Based on the series of novels by American writer Diana Gabaldon, Outlander premiered on Starz in 2014 and is still on air with season 7 premiering June 16, 2023. Outlander tells the story of Claire Randall, an Englishwoman who served as a combat nurse during World War II (played by Irish actress Caitriona Balfe). On her belated honeymoon in Inverness, Scotland, she touches an ancient stone and “falls” through time — transported straight to the early 1740s. She is confronted with a scene of British soldiers— redcoats, of course— in pursuit of some Highlanders who are suspected Jacobites. Claire is forcibly taken by these Highlanders. She marries Jamie Fraser (played by Scottish actor Sam Heughan). He fights at Culloden despite having learned from Claire that the Jacobites lost. Not knowing what happened to Jamie during the battle, Claire returns to the twentieth century to give birth to her eighteenth-century husband’s child. There, she reunites with her twentieth-century husband, Frank Randall (played by Tobias Menzies.). After a time, she decides to return “through the stones” to the eighteenth century to find Jamie. Her daughter, Brianna (played by Sophie Skelton), follows her, as does Roger, a historian and Brianna’s love interest (played by Richard Rankin).

The travels of Claire and Jamie through varied geographic and political landscapes — from Scotland and the Jacobite resistance of the early 1740s to the North Carolina backcountry and the American Revolution– illustrate the dynamism of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World. For a popular series, Outlander especially presents a more complicated and nuanced portrait of the American Revolution than is typical in many works of popular culture such as The Patriot or Hamilton: An American Musical. Elements of the storyline of Outlander even compliment key themes in the historiography of the era. The series places the American Revolution within a larger British imperial context, it represents the lived experiences of ordinary people, including women, and conveys the fluidity of identity and allegiance in the British Atlantic, all of which challenge the myth of American exceptionalism at the root of much U.S. popular culture. 

First, Outlander offers a broader temporal and geographic frame for understanding the American Revolution than most popular treatments, which start the story with the resistance in the American colonies, often focusing on eastern cities like Boston, Philadelphia, or sometimes New York. Outlander begins earlier — in 1740s Scotland. Depicted in seasons 1- 3, the suppression of Scottish Jacobites illustrates how Great Britain consolidated its control over the Celtic periphery of Ireland and Scotland before it attempted to centralize control over its North American colonies during the 1760s and 1770s. The former historical precedent heavily influenced the latter. Such continuities in the series effectively highlight how the British government sought to impose order in the colonial peripheries.^[1]  

Set in the British Atlantic, Outlander illustrates the experiences of  migration and movement that defined that world. After setting season 1 in Scotland, the scene shifts in season 2 to Paris, France, where Charles Stuart, a.k.a. “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the Stuart claimant to the British throne, is in exile, and then back to Scotland in season 3 for the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, then to Jamaica, and finally to the mainland of British North America for season 4 and beyond. These geographic leaps show how many people moved around in the eighteenth century. The American colonies, contrary to the popular image, were neither static nor isolated, but part of a larger world of travel and trade, with such connections operating as forces for social, economic, and political transformation.   

As part of that dynamic world, Claire and Jamie – inadvertently — migrate to North Carolina. Historically, hundreds of thousands of people from the British Isles migrated to North America in the decades before the revolution, including many Highland Scots who settled in North Carolina, where it was not uncommon to find Gaelic spoken.^[2]Claire and Jamie ultimately settle in the Carolina backcountry, where the population more than doubled from 1750 to 1770.^[3] 

The setting in the North Carolina backcountry offers a western vantage point for understanding how the American Revolution unfolds. The trans-Appalachian west doesn’t figure in popular memory as strongly as the east. Even Claire admits  she has an idea of what will happen in Boston during the revolution but hasn’t any knowledge of the Carolina backcountry.  But trans-Appalachia was a crucial zone for encounters and conflicts among settler-colonists, European empires, and Indigenous nations. This geographic perspective, and the depiction of Claire and Jamie acquiring land and building a settlement in the backcountry called Fraser’s Ridge, allows viewers to see colonization as an ongoing process that continued in the eighteenth century and beyond. Colonization was an experience that didn’t begin and end with the Pilgrims, as popular culture would have it, but rather it was bound up with the experience of revolution.

In seasons 4-5, the series represents North Carolina’s Regulator revolt (1766-1771) in which western farmers protested the taxes instituted by colonial government dominated by eastern elites. Though defeated at the battle of Alamance in 1771 by the colonial militia, the Regulators’ rhetoric of liberty and use of extralegal protests formed an important precursor to the revolution. Yet, the Regulators do not hold the same place in national memory as Boston’s Tea Party. Including the Regulators in a popular history enriches the audience’s understanding of the American Revolution as a multi-dimensional struggle for sovereignty within the British Empire. The series highlights that the revolution was not only a conflict between the colonies and Great Britain but also entailed sectional conflicts between east and west within various colonies.^[4] 

Second, Outlander presents a story about the American Revolution without the Founding Fathers. George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others generally compete for top billing in popular histories, and Washington does make a brief appearance in season 4, but beyond this representation, the series depicts the lived experience of war and revolution for ordinary people, albeit fictional ones. The series effectively conveys how everyday life continued amid the revolution — childbirth, illness, work, family life, interpersonal conflicts, and death. The series particularly reminds us about how precarious life was then. Women often miscarried or died in childbirth. People got sick from everyday occurrences like a snakebite or an infection. (When Claire returns to the eighteenth century for the second time, she even brings back a small supply of penicillin.) By weaving political developments into this social history of everyday life, the series captures the lived experience of ordinary people, an obvious point perhaps, but one that is easy to miss if one only studies the subject from a textbook or a timeline that presents the American Revolution as just one political event after another.

Furthermore, the series doesn’t shy away from portraying the violence, both physical and sexual, that pervaded the early modern world. It especially conveys the increasing uncertainty and vulnerability that people faced as imperial and/ or revolutionary violence intensified. Popular treatments tend to minimize that violence, which makes the revolution seem more like “a debating society” of genteel men in wigs, waistcoats, and knee breeches than a revolution, as T.H. Breen put it. But, Outlander portrays in season 6 the terror that extralegal violence and threats of violence posed. One episode portrays Jamie and Claire facing an armed mob surrounding their home. Another storyline in season 6 depicts two corrupt men, Richard and Lionel Brown, gaining influence among backcountry settlers through their control of the local committee of safety. Instruments of political mobilization, these committees also could become instruments of neighborly retribution and violence.^[5]  

Third, patriot allegiance is neither automatic nor inevitable in Outlander. While popular histories strategically omit the Loyalists (the winners write popuar history after all), the main protagonist in Outlander — Jamie — is a Loyalist. A sympathetic character, he becomes a (reluctant) agent of the Crown, promoting Scottish settlement in North Carolina, and fights for the Crown at Alamance. So, his land, his personal wealth, is all tied to the Crown. This transformation from Jacobite to (pragmatic) Loyalist was not atypical. Most Highland Scots became Tories during the American Revolution.^[6]  

Historians have increasingly emphasized the shifting identities and allegiances in the revolutionary Atlantic world, and the series illustrates this phenomenon to a popular audience. Outlander shows not only how the war made it pressing to choose sides, but how such decisions — both for individuals and for groups like the Cherokee — carried risk. The experience of choosing sides was particularly fraught in the Carolina backcountry, where people’s allegiances did not always line up consistently and could shift depending on the circumstances.^[7] Decisions about allegiance were not made solely out of ideological commitments. Many layers of connections — family, kin, friends, business— shaped such decisions. In Outlander, Jamie’s decisions thus far have been motivated primarily by family, kinship, and land.. 

Outlander also enables viewers to imagine the conversations that would have taken place between husbands and wives, parents and children, among siblings, between friends, as ordinary people decided which side they backed. In one conversation, Brianna and Roger, although they both know the outcome of the American Revolution, discuss each other’s sympathies.  “You’re a Patriot, right?” Bree asks Roger. “Well of course, if America doesn’t become America, who knows what that world will look like?” Roger responds  reluctantly. He even wonders how World War I and World War II might have played out if the British had won. As these characters contemplate historical contingency, recognizing the possibility of more than one outcome of the American Revolution, presumably viewers can do the same. 

All this praise of Outlander is not to imply the show is without problems in its representation of the past. Elements of the plot are sometimes soap opera-worthy, far-fetched, or even fantastical . Claire and Jamie build an implausibly large, two-story home in the Carolina backcountry. Claire faced accusations of witchcraft in both Scotland and North America that belong more to the seventeenth century than the eighteenth. The series relates an anachronistic plot line about slavery, lapsing into a white savior motif. It also portrays one character, Ian, Jamie’s nephew, being adopted into the Mohawk, treating the “going native” trope as unproblematic. All these plotlines deserve their own historical critique. 

Nonetheless, Outlander challenges many popular representations of the American Revolution. It does not present a triumphalist narrative of inevitable patriot victory with a familiar cast of Founding Fathers. The series’ tone is ambivalent and even melancholy at times. It  portrays the passage of time as one of separation and loss rather than of straightforward progress towards liberty and modernity. Its depiction of violence and brutality is extremely unsettling. But the series ultimately represents the survival and resilience of ordinary people and the love that sustains them amid great violence, war, and revolution. In so doing, the series can help to expand the historical imaginations of its audience, non-specialists and professional historians alike.  

---

Michelle Orihel, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History at Southern Utah University. Her teaching and research interests focus on the politics and print culture of the early American republic and the Atlantic world.

Title Image: Picture of the Scottish Highlands. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading:

Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991).

Rebecca Brannon, From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (Columbia, S.C., 2016).

Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore, The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon (Columbia, S.C., 2019). 

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992). 

Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York, 2008). 

Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge, 1997).

Christopher F. Minty, Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City (Ithaca, 2023). 

Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge, 1993). 

Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688-1788 (Manchester, 2019).

Endnotes:

^[1] Patrick Griffin, America’s Revolution (Oxford, 2012).

^[2] On the transfer of population, see Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North American: An Introduction (New York, 1986); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989), 818.

^[3] Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia, 2004), 159. 

^[4] Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2002).

^[5] T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, 2010), 4

^[6] Fischer, 818

^[7]Beeman, 176