May 2021
Virtual Author’s Talk – The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution
Following the successful expulsion of American forces from Canada in 1776, the British forces were determined to end the rebellion and devised what they believed a war-winning strategy. They were to send General John Burgoyne south to rout the Americans and take Albany. When British forces captured Fort Ticonderoga with unexpected ease in July of 1777, it looked as if it was a matter of time before they would break the rebellion in the North. Less than three and a…
Find out more »July 2021
Virtual Concert – A Second of July Celebration
John Adams—the father of American independence if ever there was one—predicted that “the Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.” The second of July is the day the Continental Congress adopted Richard Henry Lee’s resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States . . . and…
Find out more »Virtual Panel Discussion – French Memoir and Memories of the War for American Independence
The American Revolution marked the beginning of an age of democratic revolutions that swept over France and challenged the old order throughout the Atlantic world. The French officers who served in the American War of Independence, whether as idealistic volunteers or resolute soldiers of their king, remembered the experience for the rest of their lives. Many preserved their reflections on the revolution in America in daily diaries, private journals and carefully composed memoirs, leaving us with a remarkable array of…
Find out more »August 2021
Virtual Author’s Talk – Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth
In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just twenty-two years. Leaving behind a small child she had little hope of ever seeing again, Elizabeth was faced with the stark reality of being sold south to a life quite different from any she had known before. She had no idea that Robert Townsend, a son…
Find out more »Virtual Lecture – The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina
Join the Institute in observing the 250th anniversary of events of the American Revolutionary era with a lecture on the Regulator Rebellion from Marjoleine Kars. Years before shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, backcountry settlers in the North Carolina Piedmont launched their own defiant bid for economic independence and political liberty. The Regulator Rebellion of 1766-1771 arose from the conflict created by competing ideologies and goals between the religious outlook of evangelical Protestants and mainstream Anglicans; between the aspirations…
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