Clemson University Historic Properties is once again partnering with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and the Annual Giving Book Series to host “Brick by Brick: Constructing America’s Identities,” a summer speaker series featuring authors and historians.
In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, this year’s series is focused on South Carolina’s important role in the Revolutionary War. The series is funded this year by a grant from the SC250 Commission.
The series takes place on Tuesdays from June 2 through July 21 and costs $150 for the full series or $35 for a single event. Each lecture will take place at the OLLI facility in Patrick Square in Clemson, with doors opening at 5:15 p.m. The lectures will also include tours of different historical sites in the Upstate. Click here to register.
This year’s speakers are:
June 2 — John Garrison Marks, “They Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory”
Historian John Garrison Marks will talk about Americans’ long, fraught struggle to come to terms with George Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated slavery’s place in Washington’s story, and how they have wielded versions of that story in the political and cultural fights of their time.
Tour following the lecture at Ashtabula and Gassoway Tavern.
June 9 — Rod Andrew, “The Life and Times of General Andrew Pickens”
Clemson history professor Rod Andrew will talk about his biography of Gen. Andrew Pickens, which combines insights from both military and social history. His book offers an authoritative and comprehensive biography of Pickens the man, the general, the planter, and the diplomat. Andrew vividly depicts Pickens as he founds churches, acquires slaves, joins the Patriot cause, and struggles over Indian territorial boundaries on the southern frontier.
Tour following the lecture at Hopewell House, the historic home of Pickens.
June 23 — Jim Piecuch, “Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians and Slaves in the Revolutionary South”
Historian Jim Piecuch will discuss his book “Three Peoples, One King,” which explores the contributions and conjoined fates of Loyalists, Indians and slaves who stood with the British Empire in the Deep South colonies during the American Revolution. Challenging the traditional view that British efforts to regain control of the southern colonies were undermined by a lack of local support, Piecuch demonstrates the breadth of loyal assistance provided by these three groups in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
Tour following the lecture at Fort Rutledge and the Treaty Oak site.
July 7 — Carl Borick, “Backcountry Resistance: South Carolina’s Militia and the Fight for Independence”
Carl Borick, director of The Charleston Museum, will speak about his book “Backcountry Resistance,” a groundbreaking account of the citizen militia that defied British forces in South Carolina’s volatile Backcountry during the pivotal Southern campaign of the Revolutionary War. When Charleston fell in May of 1780 and the Continental Army retreated, many assumed the Patriot cause in the South had collapsed. In the state’s rugged interior, though, partisan militias waged a brutal insurgency that challenged British control and changed the course of the war.
No tour will follow this lecture.
July 21 — Alan Pell Crawford, “This Fierce People”
Author and journalist Alan Pell Crawford will discuss his book “This Fierce People,” which tells the story of the fierce battles fought in the South that made up the central theater of military operations in the latter years of the Revolutionary War, upending the essential American myth that the War of Independence was fought primarily in the North. Weaving throughout the stories of the heroic men and women, largely unsung patriots — African Americans and whites, militiamen and “irregulars,” patriots and Tories, Americans, Frenchmen, Brits, and Hessians — Crawford reveals the misperceptions and contradictions of our accepted understanding of how our nation came to be, as well as the national narrative that America’s victory over the British lay solely with Gen. George Washington and his troops.
A tour of the Upcountry History Museum in Greenville will take place prior to Crawford’s lecture.
Visit the Brick by Brick website for more information or to register.