Three Revolutionary War Symposia in Three Weekends

Three Revolutionary War symposia are happening on successive weekends this fall, so it’s time to pick and prepare.

On 20-22 September, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York will host its sixteenth Annual Seminar on the American Revolution. The speakers are:

• John Buchanan, “Nathanael Greene and the Road to Charleston”
• Mark R. Anderson, “Our Kahnawake Friends: America’s Essential Indian Allies in the Canadian Campaign”
• Phillip Hamilton, “Loyalty and Loyalism: Henry Knox and the American Revolution as a Transatlantic Family Struggle”
• Patrick Lacroix, “Promises to Keep: French-Canadian Soldiers of the Revolution, 1775-1783”
• Bryan C. Rindfleisch, “‘’Twas a Duty Incumbent on Me’: The Indigenous & Transatlantic Intimacies of George Galphin, the American Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the South”
• John Ruddiman, “German Auxiliaries’ Reactions to American Slavery and Relationships with Enslaved Americans”
• Jessica J. Sheets, “‘I Hope…We Shall Ever Be on Terms of Friendship’: The Politically Divided Tilghman Family”
• Alisa Wade, “‘To Live a Widow’: Personal Sacrifice and Self-Sufficiency in the American Revolution”

On Saturday, 28 September, the first Emerging Revolutionary War Symposium will take place at the Gadsby’s Tavern Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. This year’s theme is “Before They Were Americans,” and the speakers will discuss what led to the idea of breaking from Britain:

• Peter Henriques, “George Washington: From British Subject to American Rebel”
• Phillip Greenwalt, “I wish this cursed place was burned: Boston and the Road to Revolution”
• Katherine Gruber, “A Tailor-Made Revolution: Clothing William Carlin’s Alexandria”
• William Griffith, “A proud, indolent, ignorant self sufficient set: The Colonists’ Emergence as a Fighting Force in the French and Indian War”
• Stephanie Seal Walters, “Smallpox to Revolution”

Register through this link.


Lastly, on 3-5 October, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, in partnership with the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, will host the first International Conference on the American Revolution, bringing scholars from Britain, Ireland, and the U.S. of A. together.

The M.O.A.R. says:

The conference will coincide with the opening of Cost of Revolution: The Life and Death of an Irish Soldier, the Museum’s first international loan exhibition. With more than one hundred works of art, historical objects, manuscripts, and maps from lenders across the globe, Cost of Revolution will explore the Age of Revolutions in America and Ireland through the life story of an Irish-born artist and officer in the British Army, Richard Mansergh St. George (1750s-1798).

Scheduled presentations include:

• Linda Colley, “Britain, America, and Ireland in an Age of War and Revolution”
• Andrew Mackillop, “Losing and Winning: Scotland and the American Revolution”
• Stephen Conway, “Englishness and the American Revolution”
• Matthew Skic, “Cost of Revolution: The Life and Death of an Irish Soldier”
• Gregory J. W. Urwin, “From Parade Ground to Battlefield: How the British Army Adapted to War in North America, 1775-1783”
• Aaron Sullivan, “The Disaffected: Britain’s Occupation of Philadelphia During the American Revolution”
• Lauren Duval, “The Home Front: Gender, Domestic Space, and Military Occupation in the American Revolution”
• Padhraig Higgins, “Playing the Soldier: The Art and Material Culture of Soldiering in Eighteenth-Century Ireland”
• Ruth Kenny, “Insurrection and Identity: The Depiction of Conflict in Late Eighteenth-Century Irish Art”
• Martin Mansergh, “The Legacy of History for Making Peace in Ireland”

Attendees can also sign up for a one-day guided bus following the path of Richard St. George through the Philadelphia Campaign of 1777, a walking tour of the fight for Fort Mifflin, and of course tours of the museum itself.