Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press)

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-classes whites to Indians to enslaved Africans.

Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights.