Video Category: Clark Lectures

The 2023 George Rogers Clark Lecture: How King George III Could Have Won the American Revolution

Andrew Roberts & Gen. David Petraeus
October 27, 2023

Historian Lord Andrew Roberts and Gen. David Petraeus (U.S. Army, Ret.) deliver the 2023 George Rogers Clark Lecture through a conversation of how King George III could have won the American Revolution. Together, they have recently published the new book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. Presented annually since 1975, the Society […]

Chinese Tea and American Rebels: The Global Origins of the Revolutionary Crisis

Nick Bunker
October 28, 2022

Drawing from his book, An Empire on the Edge, a 2015 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, historian Nick Bunker delivers the annual George Rogers Clark lecture and re-examines the Boston Tea Party and the onset of the revolution in Massachusetts in 1774, placing them in their global context. Making connections between events in […]

The British Are Coming: The War for America Begins

Rick Atkinson
October 22, 2021

Who can doubt that the creation story of our founding in the American Revolution remains valid, vivid and thrilling? Even in 2021, at a moment when national unity is elusive, when our partisan rancor seems ever more toxic, when the simple concept of truth is assailed, that story informs who we are, where we came […]

Louis XVI biographer John Hardman presents the 2019 George Rogers Clark lecture discussing the factors that ultimately led to French support for the War for American Independence.

Louis XVI and the War of American Independence

John Hardman
October 25, 2019

Aid sent by Louis XVI tipped the scales in favor of a Patriot victory in the War for American Independence. However, this assistance was far from assured. John Hardman argues that the French monarch possessed sharp political insight and talent in foreign policy, and his choice to support the Patriot cause was nearly lost. Why […]

Kathleen DuVal gave the George Rogers Clark Lecture on the Revolution in the Spanish borderlands.

The American Revolution on the Spanish Borderlands

Kathleen DuVal
October 26, 2018

Kathleen DuVal illuminates the American Revolution on the Spanish borderlands—recounting clashes between the Spanish and British forces over the territory along the Gulf of Mexico. The capture of Mobile and the Siege of Pensacola were critical to the outcome of the Revolutionary War, the future of the American South and the lives of the people […]

Robert Allison of Suffolk University is the author of several books on Boston in the American Revolution.

Was the American Revolution Inevitable?

Robert Allison
October 27, 2017

“Was the American Revolution inevitable?” is a complex question posed by Robert Allison in the 2017 George Rogers Clark Lecture. The achievement of independence hinged upon the cooperation of colonists from diverse backgrounds to unite in a common cause. The people in British North America had profound differences—religious, social, political and economic—that surfaced in local […]

The causes of the Revolution are the subject of this lecture by Andrew O'Shaughnessy.

The British Empire and the Causes of the American Revolution

Andrew O'Shaughnessy
October 28, 2016

Andrew O’Shaughnessy argues that the drive to centralize control over its growing empire led Britain to adopt authoritarian policies to govern its American colonies and was one of the main causes of the American Revolution. Britain’s North American colonists resisted and ultimately rebelled to avoid the fate of Irish, a people denied the rights enjoyed […]

Maya Jasanoff presents her research about the global migration of American Loyalists after the Revolution at the American Revolution Institute.

American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

Maya Jasanoff
October 23, 2015

Global migration of American Loyalists following the Revolutionary War is a topic easily overlooked by scholars and educators as they trace the path of the victorious Patriot forces. However, at the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire, […]

James Kirby Martin of the University of Houston is an authority on the military history of the American Revolution.

George Washington and the Newburgh Conspiracy

James Kirby Martin
October 24, 2014

In March of 1783, the Newburgh Conspiracy threatened to derail the fragile calm at the end of the Revolutionary War. The rumors of peace after Yorktown brought anxiety to soldiers in the Continental Army. The Continental Congress had not paid them for some time, and they would soon return home, many impoverished. The soldiers had […]

Carol Berkin, a leader in Revolutionary era women's history, presents the vital role Patriot and Loyalist women played in the American Revolution.

Women in the American Revolution

Carol Berkin
October 25, 2013

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed and danger into the life of every American, women included. While men left to fight, women shouldered greater responsibility as they maintained their farms alone and tried to prevent confiscation of property. Patriot women maintained boycotts of imported goods, joined the army disguised as […]