Date with History
Irregular Warfare in the American Revolution
Visitors Center Theater
Thursday October 1, 6pm
Space is limited, registration required.
Cantigny’s America 250 commemoration continues with an exciting Date with History. Join Prof. John W. Hall as he surveys recent works on early American warfare and biographies of George Washington (along with his own writings) to reconcile divergent interpretations of Washington as a paragon of frontier martial virtue, a pedant for European orthodoxy, a genius, and a stumblebum. The officer who emerges is a martial cosmopolitan; the forces he constructed and the strategy by which he employed them were the hybrid products of his own experience on the American frontier and European precedents for both grande and petite guerre. Ultimately, they served his nation’s dearest interests: independence and territorial expansion.
About the Speaker
Dr. John W. Hall is the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in U.S. Military History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he co-chairs the War in Society and Culture Program and directs the Officer Education Program. He is the author of Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War (Harvard, 2009) and numerous essays on early American warfare. He is a past president of the Society for Military History and a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel with past assignments as the chief of the Future Studies Branch of the U.S. Army’s Future Warfare Division and as a historian to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, U.S. European Command, U.S. Central Command, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.