Calendar of Historical Programs

When Nathanael Greene was appointed commander of the southern Continental forces in the fall of 1780, he wrote to George Washington that he would be forced to fight “a kind of partisan war,” until he could raise an army large enough to contend with the British. Greene’s strategy was to check the main British army while partisan militia leaders like Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion and Andrew Pickens harassed the British supply lines. Marion was the most famous and successful of…

During the Revolutionary War, the Habsburg monarchy, the largest continental European power of the eighteenth century, never formally recognized the United States, but its ruling and mercantile elites saw opportunity, especially for commerce. Bringing together materials from nearly fifty international archives, Jonathan Singerton of the University of Innsbruck reconstructs the full sweep of relations between the nascent United States and one of the oldest European dynasties during and after the American Revolution and offers a reexamination of the Revolution by…

In this lecture, historian Meg Roberts sheds light on the labor of the Revolutionary War’s caregivers. Alongside the surgeons and physicians, the medical care of the thousands of sick and wounded Continental soldiers relied upon the tireless work of army nurses, camp followers, housewives, cooks, laundresses and local families. In contrast to the voluminous records of soldiers’ and military leaders’ wartime experiences, the contribution of women has often been summarized fleetingly with three verbs: washing, cooking and nursing. The rich…