Calendar of Historical Programs

The Stamp Act riots in Rhode Island and the Regulator Rebellion in North Carolina, although movements in smaller colonies, tell a broader story about the evolution of American political thought in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. Without pre-existing local tensions, the fury of the Stamp Act crisis might not have spilled over during the summer of 1765, and, without the added strains of the imperial crisis, the Regulator Rebellion might not have lasted for five years. Drawing from her…

In the final words of the Declaration of Independence, the signatories famously pledged their lives, their fortunes and their "sacred Honor" to one another, but what about those who made the opposite choice? By looking through the lens of honor culture of the period, Timothy Compeau, assistant professor of history at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario, offers an innovative assessment of the experience of Americans who made the fateful decision to remain loyal to the British…

The American founders were men of high intellect, steely integrity, and enormous ambition—but they were not all of one mind. They came from diverse colonies, and they all sought their futures on different horizons. Without reliable maps of even nearby terrain, they contributed in different, and sometimes conflicting, ways to the expansion of a young republic on the seaboard edge of a continent of whose vast expanses they were largely ignorant. Through an examination of six founders, historian Michael Barone…