Calendar of Historical Programs

Sarah Purcell, L.F. Parker Professor of History at Grinnell College, discusses how public memories and commemorations of the Revolutionary War and its veterans helped early Americans form a common bond and create a new national identity. Officers were often remembered as national heroes in newspapers, songs, pamphlets, sermons and theater productions. Martyred heroes such as Joseph Warren and Richard Montgomery created powerful images of a nation united by grief. Common veterans also sought to claim some measure of public gratitude…

William C. diGiacomantonio, chief historian of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, discusses and signs copies of his edited volume of selected letters of George Thatcher, a U.S. representative from Maine throughout the Federalist Era—the most critical and formative period of American constitutional history. The more than two hundred letters Thatcher wrote during his forty-year career as a country lawyer, national legislator and state supreme court justice document his experiences as a New England Federalist, abolitionist, religious dissenter and pedagogical innovator.…

James M. Greene, assistant professor of English at Indiana State University, discusses and signs copies of his book exploring Revolutionary War veterans’ narratives and how soldiers have been represented in two contrasting ways from the nation’s first days: as heroic symbols of the body politic and as people whose sufferings have been neglected by their country. Greene discusses several well-known examples of the genre, including narratives from Ethan Allen, Joseph Plumb Martin and Deborah Sampson, along with Herman Melville’s fictional…