January 2020
Lecture – Sealed with Blood: Gratitude for Revolutionary Veterans and American National Identity
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…
Find out more »Author’s Talk – The Insurgent Delegate: Selected Letters and Other Writings of George Thatcher
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.…
Find out more »February 2020
Author’s Talk – The Soldier’s Two Bodies: Military Sacrifice and Popular Sovereignty in Revolutionary War Veteran Narratives
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…
Find out more »Lecture—Abigail Adams and America’s “Founding Mothers”
Join the American Revolution Institute for a special lecture and reception in Charleston, South Carolina, at The Charleston Museum. The heroines of the American Revolution are underappreciated, yet their stories are inspiring and exciting. Woody Holton, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on women’s leadership during the founding era, discusses the efforts of Abigail Adams and other unsung women of the Revolution. His book Abigail Adams is an award-winning and much-celebrated work. The evening begins with a reception at 5:45…
Find out more »Lunch Bite – A Map of the Province of New York, with Part of Pensilvania, and New England
Join Library Assistant Kieran O'Keefe for a discussion of a hand-colored map of New York published in 1775 and of mapmaking in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The map was based on a survey conducted by John Montresor, a British military engineer and cartographer. Montresor came to America at the beginning of the French and Indian War and served in the British army throughout the conflict. He continued in America during the first few years of the Revolution. The map primarily…
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