**OFFSITE LOCATION** This event will take place at Eastbrook Hall at Cary Hall, 1605 Massachusetts Ave, Lexington.

In Woody Holton's  “hidden history” of the American Revolution, nothing is quite what it seems. The phrase “Liberty is Sweet” sounds like the sentiments of Jefferson or Franklin but actually comes from a 1775 letter describing George Washington’s slaves’ aspirations to escape Mount Vernon. Holton entitled his preface “Invisible Enemies” in a nod to the Native Americans who were long omitted from the story of American Independence but actually played a crucial role in bringing on the Revolutionary War and shaping its course. And these are far from the only surprises in Holton’s astounding reappraisal of the founding of the United States. Holton challenges much of the history we imagined we knew and aims to tell stories of the many who fought for liberty. This event will be moderated by Robert A. Gross.

About our author:

Woody Holton, the Peter and Bonnie McCausland Professor of American History at the University of South Carolina, is the author of Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Social History Award, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Abigail Adams (2009), whichwon the Bancroft Prize. 

Liberty is Sweet: The Epic of the American Revolution, which Holton wrote as the Huntington Library’s Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow and as a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, was published in 2021 by Simon and Schuster.

About our moderator:

Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. A specialist in the social and cultural history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, Gross focuses particularly on New England. His first book, The Minutemen and Their World (1976), presents a community study of Concord, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, portraying the lives and circumstances of inhabitants at all levels of the social order and tracing the internal conflicts that shaped the town’s participation in the mobilization against British rule. For this innovative interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement, Minutemen received the Bancroft Prize in American History in 1977; it was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition by Hill & Wang in 2001. A revised and expanded edition appeared in 2022 from Picador books, in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
His studies of the Revolutionary period continued in the edited collection In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (1993).

Attendance is on a first-come basis.

This program is made possible by the generous donors to the Cary Library Foundation.