Lectures in Liberty

T. Cole Jones, assistant professor of history at Purdue University, discusses his book examining the ways the revolutionary generation dealt with the more than seventeen thousand enemy soldiers captured during the war. The number of enemy prisoners in American custody…

Professor John Hardman, former lecturer in modern history at the University of Edinburgh and biographer of King Louis XVI, presents the 2019 George Rogers Clark Lecture on the king’s decision to support the American War for Independence. Louis, he…

Christy Pichichero, associate professor at George Mason University and the 2015 Tyree-Lamb Fellow of the American Revolution Institute, discusses her work on war and the Enlightenment in the context of French experiences during the American Revolution. French officers such…

The American Revolution was shaped by clashing ideas about the future of the West and who should control it. As the Stamp Act riled eastern seaports, frontiersmen clashed with the British Empire over another issue: Indian relations. When British officials…

Portraits of American loyalists depicted in the uniforms they wore when they fought against the patriot cause are rare. Emily Parsons discusses a recently acquired oil painting of Colonel James DeLancey of Westchester County, New York, who led several loyalist…

Battlefield clean-up is a topic rarely covered by modern historians. However, following almost any military engagement, corpses need to be buried. Who disposed of these corpses and how can we tell who buried whom? Were officers and other ranks…

Lexington, Valley Forge and Yorktown are familiar, but few Americans have ever heard of the capture of Mobile or the Siege of Pensacola—events that were critical to the outcome of the Revolutionary War, the future of the American South…

Colonel Jeremiah Lee was a fabulously wealthy colonial merchant who turned against the British Empire and became a leader of the rebel movement in Massachusetts. Historian Robert Booth brings this outspoken revolutionary to life as part of the 250th anniversary…

The American colonies broke with the British empire in 1776, but could they remain united even as they fought in a common cause? The people in the colonies had profound differences—religious, social, political and economic—that surfaced in local…

Over the course of the Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of men served in the Continental Army, many of whom formed strong friendships while fighting. Personal connections sustained men within the Continental Army and helped to open new opportunities for…

On August 4, 1781, in Charleston, South Carolina, the British army hanged Col. Isaac Hayne for treason. The death of a patriot in the cause of liberty was not a unique occurrence, but, as historian C.L. Bragg uncovers, the…

Great Britain provoked the American Revolution by pursuing increasingly authoritarian policies to centralize control over its North American colonies. These colonists, fearful of the Crown’s similarly harsh treatment of the Irish, rebelled against the tyranny that likely followed for…

During the Siege of Charleston in 1780, British forces under General Sir Henry Clinton and Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot captured nearly six thousand American troops, the largest number of prisoners taken during a single operation of the Revolutionary War. Mr. Borick…

At the start of the Revolutionary War, almost any fictitious image could pass as a portrait of an American hero, but George Washington as commander-in-chief warranted extra efforts. American printmakers searched for an accurate likeness of Washington throughout…

On April 19, 1775, a fight later known as Parker’s Revenge broke out between the Lexington Militia, led by Captain John Parker, and the British, who were retreating to Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. While the…

At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire. Loyalists traveled to Canada, they sailed for Britain, they journeyed to the Bahamas and…

Ms. Jirka shares two manuscript narratives of the French army’s march to Yorktown in 1781 from the library collections of the American Revolution Institute, written by Henri-Dominique de Palys, chevalier de Montrepos, and Robert Guillaume, baron de Dillon…

Robert Selig traces the epic 1781-1782 march of French forces under the comte de Rochambeau to and from Yorktown, alongside their American allies led by George Washington, as they traveled from Newport, Rhode Island, and West Point, New York…

There were twenty-six colonies, not thirteen, in British America in 1776, and the majority of the colonies outside the mainland were in the Caribbean. Even though they shared many important similarities and connections with the mainland colonies, they did…

Rumors of peace after Yorktown brought anxiety to soldiers in the Continental Army. Congress had not paid them for some time, and they would soon return home, many impoverished. The soldiers had sacrificed prime years of their lives in the…

Several important changes in the nature of naval warfare during the American Revolution occurred in the spring of 1778, including the internationalization of the naval war, an increase in the number and effectiveness of Loyalist privateers in American waters, and…

In the early nineteenth century, Americans searched for icons to unite them as a new nation, particularly ones that evoked civic virtue. The only symbols that the fractured and growing nation could agree on were Revolutionary War heroes. Ms. Elliott…

The American War of Independence was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed and danger into the life of every American, women included. While men left to fight, women shouldered greater responsibility as they maintained their farms alone and…