American Revolution

Historian Rick Bell examines the American Revolution as a global turning point in The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. This forum explores how events in North America reshaped international politics, empires, and ideas about liberty, revealing the Revolution’s far-reaching and lasting consequences.

Visit the Concord Museum on the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord. Museum admission will be free, and the grounds of the Museum will be buzzing with a minutemen encampment with the Billerica Colonial Minutemen and Acton Minutemen, and family activities.   Free Museum admission is supported by Highland Street Foundation, and family activities are supported by the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati.

Poet Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians) presents an original poetry reading created for Revolutionary Legacies. Hartley will share the commissioned poem inspired by Museum objects and discuss her broader work, offering Indigenous perspectives on memory, belonging, and the Revolution’s unfinished promises. Supported in part by Mass Humanities.

Join the student artists featured in the new special exhibition Revolutionary Legacies, along with  Curator David Wood and Curator and Director of Exhibitions Christie Jackson, for a gallery talk.

Join Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight for a compelling forum on the evolving meaning of American independence. Drawing on his scholarship on Frederick Douglass, Blight will explore how the ideals of the Declaration of Independence have been interpreted and contested over time. Professor Blight will discuss Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?.” Through Douglass’s words, Blight invites us to reflect on the enduring tensions between liberty and inequality, and to consider whether the nation’s founding promises remain unfulfilled.