The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire
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 Jackson O'Shaughnessy
Dr. Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy is the Vice President of Monticello, the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. An Oxford graduate, Dr. O’Shaughnessy was awarded the prestigious George Washington Book Prize and the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize for his most recent publication, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of Empire.