Events

Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, played an influential role throughout the life of George Washington. Having been introduced to Washington shortly after settling in Belvoir, Va., in 1747, Fairfax became Washington’s first employer when he hired the sixteen-year-old Virginian to survey his lands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although a professed Loyalist throughout the American Revolution, Fairfax was quiet about his sentiments and remained a close friend of Washington until Fairfax’s death in 1781. In this lecture,…

Few in history can match the revolutionary career of the marquis de Lafayette. For over fifty incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought courageously on both sides of the Atlantic as a soldier, statesman, idealist, philanthropist and abolitionist. As a teenager, Lafayette ran away from France to join the American Revolution. Returning home a national hero, he helped launch the French Revolution, eventually spending five years locked in an Austrian prison. After his release, Lafayette…

John Trumbull experienced the American Revolution firsthand by serving as an aid to American generals George Washington and Horatio Gates and being jailed as a spy. Throughout his wartime experience, he made it his mission to record the conflict, giving visual form to the great and unprecedented political experiment for the citizens of the newly formed United States. Although Trumbull’s contemporaries viewed him as a painter, Trumbull thought of himself as a historian. Drawing on his new book, historian and…