Join Deputy Director and Curator Emily Schulz Parsons for a discussion of the oil portrait A Pensioner of the Revolution, painted in 1830 by John Neagle (1796-1865), and its role in the struggle for federal pensions for Revolutionary War veterans. This somber and arresting view of a poor, elderly man hints at the financial struggles many […]
Bénédicte Miyamoto, associate professor at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and a fellow in the Institute’s library, will present highlights of manuscript maps, fortification drawings and artillery diagrams in the Institute’s collections that illustrate the art of the war in the eighteenth century. Military engineers, draftsmen and topographers received artistic training that was used to produce these documents, […]
Library Assistant Kieran O’Keefe discusses the loyalist prisoner experience during the Revolutionary War featuring an engraving of the notorious underground prison at Simsbury Mines in Connecticut, published in 1781 in a London periodical. While revolutionaries in New York contended with British forces based in New York City and Canada, they also faced an internal threat […]
Library Director Ellen Clark presents highlights of a recently acquired collection of early newspapers and other periodicals featuring articles on Alexander Hamilton. From the first official reports of his valor at Yorktown through his political career and personal trials to his death as the result of the duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton was a figure […]
Library intern Kris Stinson presents an eighteenth-century set of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and discusses the influence of classical ideas and literature on Revolutionary War participants. First published in 1776, Gibbon’s revolutionary work wove a provocative narrative on the causes of the decay and collapse of the late Roman empire, a society […]