Supporting scholarship and promoting popular understanding of the American Revolution is central to the work of the American Revolution Institute. The Institute welcomes distinguished scholars and authors to share their insights and discuss their latest research with the public at Anderson House through lectures, author's talks and panel discussions. The Institute also hosts a variety of other historical programs throughout the year, including our Lunch Bite object talks, battlefield tours, special Anderson House tour programs and other events. Many of the events we offer are free.
April 2022
Lunch Bite – Benjamin Rush’s Directions for Preserving the Health of Soldiers
Join Library Director Ellen McCallister Clark for a discussion of this 1778 publication that reflected the ambition of physicians as well as American leaders to apply the insights of contemporary science to the conduct of war. This Lunch Bite accompanies the exhibition Saving Soldiers: Medical Practice in the Revolutionary War (April 1-November 27, 2022). The presentation will last approximately 30 minutes with time afterwards for up-close viewing of the manuscript. Reservations are requested. All visitors to Anderson House age 5…
Find out more »Lecture – America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution
Join us for a special lecture at the Charleston Museum in Charleston, S.C., given by Professor C. Bradley Thompson of Clemson University, one of the most thoughtful historians of the American Revolution working today. The American Revolution was a watershed in the principles of government between centuries of monarchical and aristocratic rule and free societies based on moral principles that shaped the Revolutionary ideal of universal equality. Professor Thompson, author of America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American…
Find out more »May 2022
Dinner & Lecture – “Left Newport … Before Daylight and March’d to Chads Ford”: The Landscape of Conflict and the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777
Prior to the Battle of Brandywine, the American and British armies maneuvered across a suburban landscape familiar to many residents of Delaware and Pennsylvania. Throughout the days before the battle, however, New Castle County, Delaware, and neighboring Chester County, Pennsylvania, were militarized landscapes. During this period, General George Washington seized the strategic initiative and marched his army from a defensive position along Red Clay Creek in Delaware to the Brandywine River in Pennsylvania. In response to this American shift, General…
Find out more »Battlefield Tour – The Battle of Brandywine
Join us for a two-day experience in southeastern Pennsylvania to explore the Battle of Brandywine that includes a buffet dinner and lecture at Radley Run Country Club, located in the same area where General William Howe launched his attack in the afternoon hours of the engagement, and a lecture given by historical archaeologist Wade P. Catts, MA, RPA. To accompany the dinner and lecture, a guided day-long bus tour of the Brandywine battlefield landscape the following day will closely examine…
Find out more »Author’s Talk – Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War
Between 1776 and 1783, Great Britain hired an estimated thirty thousand German soldiers to fight in its war against the American rebels. Collectively known as Hessians, the soldiers and accompanying civilians, including hundreds of women and children, spent extended periods of time in locations as dispersed and varied as Canada, West Florida and Cuba. They penned a large body of private and official records that provide detailed accounts of the American war as well as descriptions of the built and…
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