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 2020
EVENT CANCELLED: Panel Discussion and Tour – Life Behind the Scenes: Domestic Service in the Gilded Age
Due to the current public health emergency, this event has been cancelled. Servants were the indispensable workers who made it possible for wealthy Gilded Age Americans to maintain large homes and lavish lifestyles. Join us for a panel discussion of domestic servants and the spaces they occupied with experts from Biltmore, the Preservation Society of Newport County, Winterthur, and Anderson House, followed by a reception and tours of the private third floor and other behind-the-scenes spaces. Registration is required for…
Find out more »July 2020
Concert – A Second of July Celebration of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial
https://youtu.be/-piH2OVS3Sk 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 . . .…
Find out more »August 2020
Video Lunch Bite – Mapping Revolutionary New York
Join historian Kieran O’Keefe for a discussion of eighteenth-century mapmaking, focusing on a 1775 map of New York. Based on a survey by British military engineer John Montresor, the map depicts New York and parts of neighboring colonies, and includes the topography of the Hudson highlands and the Hudson-Lake Champlain corridor, a region heavily contested during the Revolutionary War. https://youtu.be/0x7MgukEDmQ
Find out more »January 2021
Virtual Author’s Talk – America’s First Veterans
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.…
Find out more »February 2021
Virtual Author’s Talk – The Cabinet: Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
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…
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