Come early and enjoy dinner at MaGerks before our meeting!!
Live Meeting at MaGerks Fort Washington – 582 S. Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington, PA 19034
We recommend that you get here before 6:30pm to order your food and drinks before the lecture. Bring $1 or $5 cash for our used book raffle and you could win a Revolutionary War book!! Program begins around 7:15pm, Lecture around 7:30pm.
The speaker for this meeting is Andrea Lynn Smith. She’ll be speaking to us about her 2023 book, Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779.Memory Wars explores how commemorative sites and patriotic fanfare marking the mission of General John Sullivan into Iroquois territory during the Revolutionary War continue to shape historical understandings today. Sullivan’s expedition was ordered by General George Washington at a tenuous moment of the Revolutionary War. It was a massive enterprise involving thousands of men who marched across northeastern Pennsylvania into what is now New York state, to eliminate any present or future threat from the British-allied Iroquois Confederacy. Sullivan and his men carried out a scorched-earth campaign, obliterating more than forty Iroquois villages, including homes, fields, and crops. For Indigenous residents it was a catastrophic invasion. For many others the expedition yielded untold bounty: American victory over the British along with land and fortunes beyond measure for settlers who soon moved onto the razed village sites.
The Sullivan Expedition has long been fixed on the landscape of Pennsylvania and New York by a cast of characters, including amateur historians, newly formed historical societies, and local chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Asking how it is that people continue to “celebrate Sullivan” in the present day, Memory Wars underscores the symbolic value of the past as well as the dilemmas posed to contemporary Americans by the national commemorative landscape.
About Andrea Lynn Smith:
Dr. A. Lynn Smith is a historical anthropologist whose research explores settler colonialism, memory and forgetting, colonialism and
place-loss. Her new book, “Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779,” contrasts the official story of a Revolutionary War expedition with that told by Seneca and other Native American leaders and at Haudenosaunee cultural centers. Previous publications consider colonial nostalgia with the award-winning “Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France” (2006); the silencing of Native and Latino voices in local history museums in the American southwest; and the role of place-loss in community identities in the aftermath of forced removal in “Rebuilding Shattered Worlds: Creating Community by Voicing the Past” (2016). Dr. Smith is professor of anthropology at Lafayette College, Easton, PA.