Events

Executive Director Jack Warren discusses America’s First Veterans, the new book from the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati. Using eighty-five manuscripts, rare books, prints, broadsides, paintings and other artifacts, America’s First Veterans introduces the stories of the men—and some women—who bore arms in the Revolutionary War. The book follows their fate in the seventy years after the war’s end and traces the development of public sentiment that led to the first comprehensive military pensions in our history.…

Lindsay M. Chervinsky discusses The Cabinet: Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, an examination of the extralegal creation of the president’s advisory body in response to the threats facing George Washington and the first administration. The book also demonstrates the importance of Washington’s military experience to the formation of the presidency and the federal government. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections and constitutional challenges—and finding congressional help lacking—George Washington decided he needed a group of advisors. Washington modeled his new cabinet on…

Serena Zabin, professor of history and director of the American studies program at Carleton College, discusses her book on the personal and political conflicts that erupted in the Boston Massacre. Following the British troops dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to suppress colonial unrest, Dr. Zabin has uncovered the forgotten stories of the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies and who became neighbors to the colonists in Boston. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street,…