Speaker: Dr. H. W. Brands, Award-Winning Author and History Professor, University of Texas at Austin

The American Revolution was more than a fight against the British: it was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides, Loyalist or Patriot. But what causes people to forsake their country and take arms up against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels? Join us as Brands examines these questions and reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends. Copies of Brands’ latest work, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution, will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop.

Brands is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History. He was previously a member of the history faculty at Texas A&M University, where he taught for 17 years. He has written 30 books, coauthored or edited five others, and published dozens of articles and scores of reviews. His writings have received critical and popular acclaim. Two of his books, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In his latest work, Our First Civil War, Brands tells the story of the American Revolution as it really unfolded—as a civil war between colonial patriots and those loyal to the British Crown and Parliament. Brands attended Stanford University and studied history and mathematics. After earning graduate degrees in mathematics and history, he received a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin.

The American Revolution Lecture Series is sponsored by the North Carolina Society of the Cincinnati.