Supporting scholarship and promoting popular understanding of the American Revolution is central to the work of the American Revolution Institute. The Institute welcomes distinguished scholars and authors to share their insights and discuss their latest research with the public at Anderson House through lectures, author's talks and panel discussions. The Institute also hosts a variety of other historical programs throughout the year, including our Lunch Bite object talks, battlefield tours, special Anderson House tour programs and other events. Many of the events we offer are free.
April 2022
Lecture – Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero
Dr. Joseph Warren, a respected physician and architect of the Revolutionary movement, was one of the most important figures in early American history—and might have gone on to lead the country had he not been killed at Bunker Hill in 1775. Warren was involved in almost every major protest against British policies in the Boston area for a decade, from the Stamp Act protests to the Boston Massacre to the Boston Tea Party, and his incendiary writings included the famous…
Find out more »Lecture – America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution
Join us for a special lecture at the Charleston Museum in Charleston, S.C., given by Professor C. Bradley Thompson of Clemson University, one of the most thoughtful historians of the American Revolution working today. The American Revolution was a watershed in the principles of government between centuries of monarchical and aristocratic rule and free societies based on moral principles that shaped the Revolutionary ideal of universal equality. Professor Thompson, author of America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American…
Find out more »May 2022
Dinner & Lecture – “Left Newport … Before Daylight and March’d to Chads Ford”: The Landscape of Conflict and the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777
Prior to the Battle of Brandywine, the American and British armies maneuvered across a suburban landscape familiar to many residents of Delaware and Pennsylvania. Throughout the days before the battle, however, New Castle County, Delaware, and neighboring Chester County, Pennsylvania, were militarized landscapes. During this period, General George Washington seized the strategic initiative and marched his army from a defensive position along Red Clay Creek in Delaware to the Brandywine River in Pennsylvania. In response to this American shift, General…
Find out more »Author’s Talk – Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War
Between 1776 and 1783, Great Britain hired an estimated thirty thousand German soldiers to fight in its war against the American rebels. Collectively known as Hessians, the soldiers and accompanying civilians, including hundreds of women and children, spent extended periods of time in locations as dispersed and varied as Canada, West Florida and Cuba. They penned a large body of private and official records that provide detailed accounts of the American war as well as descriptions of the built and…
Find out more »June 2022
Lecture – The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution
On June 9, 1772, a group of prominent Rhode Islanders rowed out to the British schooner Gaspee, which had run aground six miles south of Providence while on an anti-smuggling patrol. After threatening and shooting its commanding officer, the raiders looted the vessel and burned it to the waterline. Despite colony-wide sympathy for the raid, neither the government in Providence nor authorities in London could let this pass without a response. As a result, a Royal Commission of Inquiry headed…
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