Fleeing America
Growing up, historian Maya Jasanoff traveled extensively over summers with her family from their Ithaca, N.Y., home to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. “My love of history grew up in tandem with travel, which gave me the chance to see history up close in diverse and fascinating forms,” said Jasanoff, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in Harvard’s Department of History and an expert on the history of modern Britain and the British Empire. “The fact that my mother comes from India, and my father’s family from Eastern Europe, has given me a more personal reason to study the history of the British Empire, and the history of cross-cultural relations more generally,” recalled Jasanoff, whose book “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World” was recently published. “Here in America we learn about the revolution from the winners’ side,” she said, “and little attention gets paid to...