The Yorktown Victory Center's Fall Lecture Series

REVOLUTIONARY WAR LECTURES EXPLORE MIGRATION PATTERNS,

LOYALIST EXPERIENCE, PERIOD SOUTHERN PAINTINGS

YORKTOWN, Va., July 23, 2013 – The Yorktown Victory Center’s Revolutionary War lecture series returns this year with guest scholars speaking at 7 p.m. Saturdays, September 14 and 28 and October 5, in the museum’s Richard S. Reynolds Foundation Theater.

James C. Kelly, chief of Museum Programs for the U.S. Army Center of Military History, will present “To, Through, and Beyond Virginia” on September 14.  He will address the paradox that Virginia was the largest destination for voluntary and involuntary immigrants to colonial North America and the largest source of emigrants to the west in the early republic.  Prior to joining the Center of Military History, which operates 62 museums at military installations in the United States, Germany and South Korea, Dr. Kelly was director of museums for the Virginia Historical Society, where he was co-curator and co-author of Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement.

Holger Hoock, the J. Carroll Amundson Professor of British History at the University of Pittsburgh, will present “‘The Tyranny of the People’: A Loyalist Perspective on the American Revolution” on September 28.  The lecture will explore the role of violence in the treatment of Loyalists and in the stories they told of the Revolution and will conclude with an outlook on how they were re-integrated in the new American nation after 1783.  Dr. Hoock is author of Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850 and previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Liverpool, where he founded and directed the Eighteenth-Century Worlds interdisciplinary research center.

The series concludes October 5 with Carolyn J. Weekley presenting “Painters and Paintings in the Early American South: 1735-1800,” a survey of painters and their customers, in this case Southern clients, who commissioned various sorts of paintings, but mostly portraits, from about 1735 to the end of the century.  Ms. Weekley is Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Juli Grainger Curator Emerita.  She curated “Painters and Paintings in the Early American South” currently at Colonial Williamsburg’s DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum and is author of a recently published book by the same name. 

     
Admission to the lectures is free, and advance reservations are recommended by calling (757) 253-4572 or e-mailing rsvp@jyf.virginia.gov.  The series is supported with private donations to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Inc.

ABOUT THE YORKTOWN VICTORY CENTER

The Yorktown Victory Center, located at Route 1020 and the Colonial Parkway, chronicles the American Revolution, from colonial unrest to the formation of the new nation, through gallery exhibits and historical interpretation at re-creations of a Continental Army encampment and 1780s farm.  Under the administration of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, a Virginia state agency, the museum is undergoing a transformation with a new facility and expanded exhibits and will be known as the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown when the project is complete.  The Yorktown Victory Center remains open to visitors daily while work is under way.  For more information, visit www.historyisfun.org or call (888) 593-4682 toll-free or (757) 253-4838.