An Evening with Joseph Ellis (J. Harvie Wilkinson, Jr. Lecture 2022)

Was the American Revolution really a revolution? Was George Washington a great general? Was the American victory a miracle or inevitable? Dr. Joseph Ellis explores these questions and more in his lecture on July 20, 2022, about "The Cause," complicating conventional narratives to present a richly nuanced vision of this foundational moment in American history. A landmark work of narrative history, "The Cause" challenges the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people, and as a nation. Joseph Ellis is one of the nation’s leading scholars of American history. A professor of history, he has taught in the Leadership Studies program at Williams College, the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. Ellis’s commentaries have been featured on CSPAN, CNN, and PBS’s Lehrer News Hour, and he has appeared in several documentaries on early America. The author of twelve books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" and won the National Book Award for "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson." Joseph Ellis’s latest work is "The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773–1783." The content and opinions expressed in this presentation are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.