Two Online Archeology Events on 15 Feb.

Two online events about archeology are coming up next Thursday, 15 February.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum will host its third annual Virtual Archaeology Conference that afternoon from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M., with staff speaking about various work going on at and around the museum.

The scheduled presentations are:

• Patricia Reid, “Legacy Collection: Leege Collection Artifacts from Arnold’s Bay”
• Cherilyn Gilligan, “Arnold’s Bay Artifacts: Conservation and Context”
• Chris Sabick, “The Excavation and Documentation of the Revolutionary War Row Galley Congress”
• Paul Gates, “Site Formation Processes: Defining the Theoretical Process of Archaeology for the Revolutionary Warship Congress”

Those will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Go to this webpage for more details on the museum’s program and to register.

That same evening, starting at 7:00 P.M., the Shirley-Eustis House Association will host an online lecture by Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley on “Archaeology at Shirley Place.”

Bagley will share new information learned about the eighteenth-century enslaved inhabitants of the estate and new insights into the former location of the 1747 Shirley-Eustis House. The presentation will include artifact discussions and digital reconstructions of the historic property before it was developed in the nineteenth century.

Go to this page to register for the Shirley-Eustis House’s event.

Both of these online events are free, but donations to the hosting organizations are welcome.

Upcoming Online Book Events

Here are some book discussions coming to a computer screen near you in the next couple of weeks.

Thursday, 26 August, 8:00 P.M.
History Camp
Kathleen DuVal, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will discuss her prize-winning book Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, which looks at the history of the American Revolution through the eyes of slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Free.

Tuesday, 31 August, 7:00 P.M.
Harvard Book Store
Mike Duncan, host of the groundbreaking podcast The History of Rome and author of The Storm Before the Storm will discuss his latest book, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. He will be joined in conversation by Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History podcast. This is a ticketed event. A $35.25 ticket buys access to the event plus a signed hardcover copy of Hero of Two Worlds mailed afterwards.

Thursday, 9 September, 8:00 P.M.
History Camp
Jack Kelly, author and historian, on his new book, Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty, which covers the Revolutionary War battle on Lake Champlain, led by Philip Schuyler, Horatio Gates, and the heroic Benedict Arnold, that delayed British invasion until the following year. Free.

Fort Plain Museum’s American Revolution Conference, 7-10 June 2018

Fort Plain Museum’s American Revolution Mohawk Valley Conference will take place this year from Thursday, 7 June, to Sunday, 10 June.

The event schedule includes author presentations, a bus tour of historic sites in central New York, genealogy consulting, and a fundraising dinner featuring first-person interpretations of two early Presidents.

Thursday, 7 June 2018 

Bus tour of historic sites featuring the events of 1778: the Battle of Cobleskill, the Cherry Valley Massacre, Springfield, Andrustown, Adam Helmer’s Run, Fort Herkimer, and Fort Plain/Rensselaer. Lunch stop in Cooperstown.

• Michael E. Newton, “Alexander Hamilton’s Revolutionary War Service”

Friday, 8 June 2018

Genealogy Day: Visit Mohawk Country historic sites (sites, schedules, and admission fees to be posted separately). Sites will have presentations and/or historians on hand to discuss the families that fought on both sides during the American Revolution.

• Russell Shorto,  “Revolution Song: America’s Founding Era in Six Remarkable Lives”

Saturday and Sunday, 9-10 June 2018

Author presentations:

• Edward G. Lengel, “George Washington and the Burning of New York City, 1776”
• Eric H. Schnitzer, “‘Hessians’ at the Battle of Bennington, 1777”
• James L. Nelson, “Benedict Arnold’s Navy: The Story of the Rag Tag Fleet that Lost the Battle of Valcour Island and Won the American Revolution”
• Don N. Hagist, “Redcoats Along the Mohawk: British Soldiers in Western New York, 1777-1783”
• Bruce M. Venter, “Benedict Arnold’s Nemesis: Colonel John Brown’s Fateful Journey to the Mohawk Valley”
• Jennifer DeBruin, “Traitors, Spies & Heroes: Loyalist Espionage in the American Revolution”
• Glenn F. Williams, “Sir William Johnson, the Iroquois Confederacy, and Lord Dunmore’s War”
• John Buchanan, “Two Warriors: George Washington and Sir William Howe”
• Wayne Lenig, “The Tryon County Committee of Safety”

There will also be a panel discussion featuring these authors on the topic “Patriot or Loyalist?” I’m not sure how these presentations will be divided between the two weekend days.

Saturday, 9 June 2018

“An Evening with Washington and Madison”
Fundraising Dinner at the Bridge Walk at the Perthshire, Amsterdam, N.Y.
George Washington and James Madison, as portrayed by Brian Hilton and Kyle Jenks, will discuss their journeys to upstate New York and other founding moments.

I enjoyed this conference two years ago. Though the venue has a lot of space, last year’s event nearly sold out. The last day to register is Thursday, 31 May.

Raise the Spitfire?

Earlier this month the Associated Press reported on the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum’s proposal to raise, preserve, and display a gunboat that sank in 1776.

The boat is the Spitfire, one of Gen. Benedict Arnold’s fleet during the Battle of Valcour Island. The dispatch says:

The Spitfire was found during a 1997 sonar survey of the lake. Museum divers check on it yearly. Its mast is still erect and the bow cannon still in the firing position. The ammunition and other artifacts from the battle are buried in mud.

For almost 250 years, the Spitfire has been protected by the cold water of the lake. But Cohn said its future is in danger because of the expected arrival in the lake of quagga mussels, an invasive species that has reached the Great Lakes and could potentially destroy metal fastenings that hold the vessel together.

Back in the 1930s another gunboat, the Philadelphia, was pulled up from the lake. The museum made a replica that sails on Lake Champlain today, shown above.

Raising the Spitfire is a huge undertaking. The plan being proposed would take twenty-two years and cost an estimated $44 million. The steps involved:

• two years of planning at a cost of $1 million.
• building a facility to house the boat in Burlington, Vermont.
• bringing the Spitfire to the surface around 2025.
• preserving the boat by strengthening the cells of the wood with chemicals over fifteen years.
• building a museum to display the boat near Plattsburgh, New York.

If all goes according to plan, the Spitfire would be ready for its close-up around 2039.

New Words from Richard Henry Lee

The American Antiquarian Society just announced that retiree Kathy Major, back in the archive as a volunteer, had identified three previously unknown letters from Richard Henry Lee.

Lee is best recalled for having proposed independence at the Continental Congress in 1776, but he was active from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 (on both sides) to presiding over the Congress in 1784-85 to the first U.S. Senate in 1789.

The society’s blog explains:

The letters were donated to AAS almost thirty years ago by Mrs. Allan Carr McIntyre of Watertown, Massachusetts, and contain much valuable information about the military progress (or lack thereof) of the American Revolution from 1776 to 1778. Written in Philadelphia, all three were addressed to Col. John Page (1744-1808), then serving as lieutenant governor of Virginia.

Lee wrote the letters on 23 Sept 1776, 10 Oct 1777, and 7 Sept 1778. Those dates were, respectively, soon after the Battle of Brooklyn, soon after the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and soon after the Battle of Rhode Island. In other words, not at high points of the war from the American side.

Yet Lee emphasized the positive. Despite the “northern militias…immensely expensive and utterly useless,” he wrote, the Continental Army was ready to stop the British forces at Harlem Heights (which it did, but only for a couple of weeks). “We heard yesterday from Lake Champlain and have the pleasure to find things there in a safe situation for this Campaign at least,” that 1776 letter concluded.

In 1777 Lee treated Germantown as a near-victory, but he was writing from York, Pennsylvania, because the Congress had had to flee from Philadelphia. The Valley Forge winter was ahead. (News of Saratoga hadn’t reached York yet or Lee would surely have emphasized it.)

About the 1778 fighting in Rhode Island, Lee wrote, “Victory declared in our favor, the enemy being driven from the field in great disorder.” Of course the goal of the American campaign had been to drive the British out of Newport, and the British were still there. But victory was declared.

Venues for Valiant Ambition by Nathaniel Philbrick

Following up on Bunker Hill (discussed in most of these postings), Nathaniel Philbrick has brought out Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution.

As the title indicates, this book focuses on the Continental commander-in-chief and one of his most capable yet prickly protégés.

Philbrick describes Arnold’s feats on Lake Champlain in the Battle of Valcour Island in the fall of 1776, at the same time that the British army was driving Washington out of New York City. He follows the two men through their separate campaigns—Washington running into defeat at Brandywine, Arnold enjoying part of the victory at Saratoga.

And then everything started to go terribly wrong.

Nat Philbrick’s great skill as a historian is finding details and quotations that bring out the emotional core of a story. In this book he focuses on the two men’s psyches as they grew together and apart. He also argues that the revelation of Arnold’s treachery, coming at a low point in the fight for independence, strengthened American unity by providing an enemy to rally against.

I missed Philbrick’s first swing through these parts on his book tour, but he’s coming back through New England next month. Here are the venues:

• 7 June, 7:00, Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center on behalf of the Lake Champlain Maritime Center, Burlington, Vermont
• 9 June, 7:00, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester
• 10 June, 4:00, Falmouth Historical Society
• 15 June, 7:00, Barrington Books, Barrington, Rhode Island
• 16 June, 6:00, Boston Athenaeum

Then three events at the Nantucket Book Festival:

• 18 June, 9:00 A.M., “Revolutionary Figures on a Shifting Canvas,” Nantucket Atheneum
• 18 June, 1:00 P.M., Mitchell’s Book Corner
• 19 June, 6:00 P.M., panel discussion at Nantucket Whaling Museum

For more details and other venues, check Philbrick’s website.