Calendar of Historical Programs

During the last engagement in the 1776 northern campaign season, Gen. Benedict Arnold burned the remaining vessels of his American fleet in Lake Champlain to prevent capture by the British. In 2020, the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program funded an archeological survey project of this area, now classified as a Revolutionary War battlefield known as Arnold’s Bay. Historical archaeologists Cherilyn Gilligan and Christopher Sabick of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum discuss their work on this recent archaeological study…

When Nathanael Greene was appointed commander of the southern Continental forces in the fall of 1780, he wrote to George Washington that he would be forced to fight “a kind of partisan war,” until he could raise an army large enough to contend with the British. Greene’s strategy was to check the main British army while partisan militia leaders like Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion and Andrew Pickens harassed the British supply lines. Marion was the most famous and successful of…

During the Revolutionary War, the Habsburg monarchy, the largest continental European power of the eighteenth century, never formally recognized the United States, but its ruling and mercantile elites saw opportunity, especially for commerce. Bringing together materials from nearly fifty international archives, Jonathan Singerton of the University of Innsbruck reconstructs the full sweep of relations between the nascent United States and one of the oldest European dynasties during and after the American Revolution and offers a reexamination of the Revolution by…