ROOM CHANGE: This event will now take place in the 5th Floor Conference Room

Washington History Seminar
Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs

The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the Revolutionary World, and the Fate of Empire

Andrew O'Shaughnessy
MONTICELLO/UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Britain seemingly should have won the Revolutionary War.  Its failure to do so is commonly assumed to be due to the incompetence of commanders and the politicians who are ridiculed in fiction and in movies.  Although less crudely presented, such caricatures even permeate scholarly literature.  The talk will challenge the stereotypes and offer a very different explanation of why Britain lost the American War of Independence.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy is the Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and Professor of History at the University of Virginia.  He was born in Britain where he earned his undergraduate degree and doctorate at Oxford University. His most recent book The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2013) has been the recipient of five national awards including the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize and the George Washington Book Prize.

Monday November 17, 2014
4:00 p.m. 
Woodrow Wilson Center, 5th Floor Conference Room
Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop