This session will examine the similarities and differences between the two towns socially, economically and politically, and discuss how each came to play its signal part on April 19, 1775. We’ll also look at the long dispute between the two towns, starting in 1825, with who deserved credit for firing the first shots and starting the Revolutionary War – and why that once mattered.

About our speaker:

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).

About our moderator:

Paul O'Shaughnessy currently serves as a member of the Lexington 250th Commission.  He is also a Board member and past President of the Lexington Historical Society, President of the Friends of Minuteman Park, Quartermaster and an Officer in His Majesty's 10th Regiment of Foot, and current Chair of the Lexington Historic Districts Commission.  In his spare time, Paul serves as Technical Director at The Footlight Club theater in Jamaica Plan and is an Engineering Director at Covaris LLC, a biotech in Woburn.  Excepting a 20-year interval in Newton Upper Falls, he has lived in Lexington, now residing with his wife Diane and three excellent cats.

Attendance is on a first-come basis.

Copies of the author's book will be available for purchase through Maxima Book Center or can be borrowed through the Minuteman Library Network.

Presented in partnership with the Lexington Historical Society.

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