Admission:
Event: $10.00 | Members & Children: Free
Exhibit, Event, & Dinner*: $41.95
*Extend your time with us and enjoy a viewing of the limited-time George Wilson Rustic Furniture Exhibit between 5:00pm-6:00pm, followed by a meal in our historic, lakeside Dining Hall. Click below to register for this event and see the option to buy a ticket “with Meal.” Advance registration is required to add a meal as space is limited and subject to availability.
The Sagamore Seminars education series is offered by Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization chartered by the Board of Regents of the Education Department of the State of New York and sole owner and operator of Great Camp Sagamore.
250 years ago, representatives from 13 colonies met in Philadelphia and declared their independence. Paradoxically, this was rather after the fact – they had already raised an army, committed treason against the crown, and fought pitched battles for about a year. And many students of the enlightenment will know that while the precise order of the words was unique, the Declaration of Independence’s preamble was hardly new – principal author Thomas Jefferson and editors John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Phillip Livingston, and Roger Sherman were expressing sentiments that had already existed for decades.
There are other paradoxes as well. All 13 colonies possessed legal slavery, but all fought for a cause that claimed all men were created equal. While they fought against taxation without representation, their government forced those realities on the large majority of Americans afterwards (even white men), who were unable to vote. And while during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln could celebrate the “mystic chords of memory stretching from every patriot grave”, an honest accounting of the past requires us to reckon with the fact that the Revolution was itself a civil war, and we have more or less written the loyalists out of our history.
Still, something revolutionary DID happen in Philadelphia, and has happened ever since. Sagamore‘s Historian Connor Williams will discuss all these ideas and reflect on the importance of the American Revolution in our day, in its day, and ever since.
Connor Williams - Sagamore Historian
In addition to being Sagamore’s staff historian, Connor Williams is a formally trained American historian with degrees from Middlebury College, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. His past professional experience involves writing, speaking, teaching, consulting, and working for the United States Congress. In all these pursuits, he has enjoyed being able to keep one foot in the traditions and standards of formal academia, and one foot in the exigencies and politics of the present. The Sagamore Seminars in History provide a terrific chance to share his varied experiences and expertise with terrific participants in an exceptional, historical, and rejuvenating setting.