The Minutemen and Robert A. Gross Panel, 26 Feb.

On the afternoon of Sunday, 26 February, I’ll be part of the Friends of Minute Man Park’s 2023 Winter Lecture, “Minutemen Revisited: Rethinking Concord’s Role in the Revolution. A Conversation with Robert Gross and Friends.”

The event description says:

The Minutemen and Their World, first published during the Bicentennial year of 1776, offered a novel view of Concord’s path to Revolution. The book, which won the Bancroft Prize, showed that the townspeople took a moderate stance on British taxes and enforcement measures until the summer of 1774; only when the royal government threatened to seize the right of local self-government did the community rise up and mobilize for war. The reasons why were deeply rooted in the social history of the town.

Does this interpretation still hold up? In 2022, the author published a revised and expanded edition of The Minutemen and views Concord more broadly in relation to its neighboring towns, introduces new details on the tense atmosphere in the run-up to April 19, 1775, and adds fresh material about Concord’s role as a center for incarcerating Loyalist and British prisoners of war. In this talk, he will discuss the additions and changes of The Minutemen in conversation with leading American Revolution experts.

Those folks posing questions to Bob Gross will be:

• Joel Bohy, expert in militaria at Bruneau & Co., frequent appraiser on Antiques Roadshow, and contributor to the Concord Museum’s April 19 exhibits.
• Jim Hollister, lead interpreter at Minute Man National Historical Park, organizer of many reenactments and historical demonstrations, and recent recipient of the Robert Gross Award for service to Concord history.
• myself. 

But the real star of this event is of course Robert A. Gross, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. In addition to The Minutemen and Their World, he wrote a sequel The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021), which won the most recent Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize.

Bob Gross is a former assistant editor of Newsweek and has written for such periodicals as Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, the Boston Globe and New York Times, The American Scholar, The New England Quarterly, Raritan, and The Yale Review. For several years he was the book review editor of the William & Mary Quarterly. After working at various universities, for the past several years he has lived in Concord.

This is an online panel discussion scheduled to start at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, 26 February, and to run about ninety minutes with questions. It’s free, but viewers must register through this link.

This program is co-sponsored by the Friends of Minute Man and Minute Man National Historical Park. It’s supported in part by a grant from the Concord Cultural Council, which in turn is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.