Events

August 2023
Virtual Lecture - A View From Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe
From 1778 to 1788, future president John Adams lived in Europe as an American diplomat. Joined by his wife, Abigail, in 1784, the two shared rich encounters with famous heads of the European royal courts. Jeanne E. Abrams, professor of history at the University of Denver, shows that the Adams’ journey not only changed the course of their intellectual, political and cultural development, but served to strengthen their loyalty to America, and highlights how the Adamses and their American contemporaries…
Find out more »September 2023
Author's Talk - Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City
Drawing from his recent book, historian Christopher Minty, Ph.D., explores the origins of loyalism in New York City between 1766 and 1776, and adds to our understanding of the coming of the American Revolution. Focusing on political culture, organization, and patterns of allegiance, Dr. Minty demonstrates how the contending allegiances of loyalists and patriots were all but locked in place by the outset of war in 1775, and that the political alignments formed during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and…
Find out more »Special Program - The 2023 Society of the Cincinnati Prize Presentation & Reception
The 2023 Society of the Cincinnati Prize honors historian Friederike Baer, Ph.D., and her ground-breaking book Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022). 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…
Find out more »October 2023
Author's Talk - Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late-Eighteenth Century Atlantic World
Ashli White, professor of history at the University of Miami, explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions and argues that radical ideals in the eighteenth century were contested through objects as well as in texts. In this lecture on her new book, Dr. White considers how revolutionary things brought people into contact with these transformative political movements in visceral, multiple, and provocative ways. Focusing on a range of objects—ceramics and furniture, garments and accessories,…
Find out more »Author's Talk - The Tory's Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America
The Spurgin family of North Carolina experienced the cataclysm of the American Revolution in the most dramatic ways—and from different sides. Jane Welborn Spurgin was a patriot who welcomed Gen. Nathanael Greene to her home and aided the Continental forces. Her husband was a loyalist and an officer fighting for King George III in the local Tory militia. Cynthia Kierner, professor of history at George Mason University, discusses her new book that focuses on the wife of a middling backcountry…
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