Calendar of Historical Programs

Museum Collections and Operations Manager Paul Newman discusses a manuscript orderly book kept by British General Robert Cuninghame from his time in command of an army camp near Clonmel, Ireland, 1778. An important historical record, this book records the daily orders disseminated at the camp and includes court martial proceedings, unit movements and the rotation of soldiers to be placed on guard duty. This Lunch Bite will examine the orderly book and its significance in offering a better understanding of…

Research Services Librarian Rachel Nellis discusses Catharine Macaulay, a radical English writer and historian sympathetic to the American cause, and her 1775 pamphlet, An Address to the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs. Using events such as Parliament’s passing of the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre, Macaulay’s pamphlet was written as an appeal to Great Britain to change its policies towards the colonies. This Lunch Bite will not only examine the contents within…

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” The words Nathan Hale is said to have uttered just before being hanged as a spy by the British are among the best remembered of the Revolution. The young schoolteacher-turned-officer-turned-spy was a hero to nineteenth-century Americans, but they didn’t know what he looked like, as no contemporary likeness survived. Then two American sculptors working at the turn of the twentieth century imagined Nathan Hale in bronze…