Dr. Julie Flavell

Independent Historian

Dr. Julie Flavell was born in the United States and grew up in Massachusetts, where she acquired a life-long interest in the American Revolution. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, she gained her PhD in history at University College London. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1999. She now lives in Scotland with her husband, who is British. Flavell has lectured in American history at Dundee and Edinburgh Universities, where she specialized in the Revolutionary era. Her first book, "When London Was Capital of America", explores the period just before the American Revolution through the experiences of individual colonists in London.

It was in quest of material for a sequel about London during the American Revolution that she came across the letters of Caroline Howe in the British Library. Caroline's life spanned two seminal wars for the birth of America, the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the American Revolution just twelve years later. Caroline’s brothers became Anglo-American heroes in the first of these conflicts, but the second transformed them into foreigners in a land they had spilt their blood to defend. Flavell's latest book, "The Howe Dynasty", tells the dramatic story of this family across four wars through the eyes of the Howe women, radically recasting the American War of Independence as a civil war. "The Howe Dynasty" (2021) was a Finalist for the 2022 George Washington Book Prize, and a New York Times Editor's Choice, August 2021.