Read the Museum’s Spring Newsletter for more details on our exciting Programs
Nathanael Greene’s improbable rise, from militia private and gimpy son of a Quaker preacher to military legend and George Washington’s most trusted advisor, sounds like fiction. But it’s all true.
On Thursday, April 2, Gerald M. “Ged” Carbone will be in our Museum Gallery to tell us about Nathanael Greene’s incredible life.
Ged Carbone is the author of Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American Revolution, as well as a biography of George Washington and a history of Brown & Sharpe.
A former journalist, he is a recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award. Ged completed a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, and earned a master’s degree in Public Humanities from Brown University.
The program will take place in our Museum Gallery at 7:00 p.m. and will be live-streamed on the Museum’s YouTube channel. The program opens the Museum’s Spring 2026 Lecture Series and is free and open to the public. Watch Live Stream on our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@pdmac6899
“We have met the enemy and they are ours.” So begins one of the most famous dispatches in American history. Its author, Oliver Hazard Perry, wrote it in a report to Gen. William Henry Harrison after his victory over British forces on Lake Erie in September 1813.
On Thursday, April 23, Professor Evan Wilson will be in our Museum Gallery to describe the battle and place it in a broader context. How did Perry come to be in command of American forces on Lake Erie? How did his victory contribute to the broader American war effort? And what can Perry’s career tell us about the history of the U.S. Navy in the early nineteenth century?
Evan Wilson is an associate professor in the Hattendorf Historical Center at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport. A recipient of the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History, he researches the naval history of Britain and other countries from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Before coming to Newport, he was the Caird Senior Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum in the United Kingdom, and Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He holds degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Oxford.
Please join us on April 23, in person or on our YouTube channel, to learn why Perry’s victory was so important.
During the Revolutionary War, New England soldiers had a greater, and more effective, enemy to fight than British Army. It was disease— small-pox, dysentery, typhus (known as “camp fever”), and other highly contagious illnesses that flourished in crowded environments with poor sanitation, poor nutrition, and inadequate protection from harsh weather.
In his latest book, New England in the American Revolution: Stories of Starvation, Disease and Determination, Robert A. Geake explores the challenges soldiers faced through diaries, letters, and other documents.
Despite all of these hardships, many men continued to fight, a testament to their determination as well as their bravery. Bob Geake will tell us about some of those men when he appears in our Museum Gallery on Thursday, May 21. Watch Live Stream on our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@pdmac6899
