How does our picture of the American Revolution change if focus on the many people caught up in it who were neither ardent “patriots” nor committed “loyalists?”  Such people – the ambivalent, the neutral, the “disaffected” – made up a large if uncertain percentage of the population of what became the United States.  However, historians have rarely given their experiences as much attention as their numbers warrant.  This talk uses the story of a single extended trans-Atlantic family with divided and complex loyalties to develop a fuller, more human history of the American Revolution understood primarily as a time of communal crisis and civil war.

ASL interpretation provided at all CHAT lectures. Lecture is free and open to the public.