May 20, 2023
9am - 5pm
9:00am Welcome—Beth Hill, President and CEO, Fort Ticonderoga.
9:15-9:45am Anchors for Collective Identity: Culloden Militaria of the ’45, Artefacts and Memorabilia—The items taken by people after the Battle of Culloden to different parts of the British Empire infused historic fact and myth to create collective identities. This presentation explores how these objects were cared for (in some cases fabricated many years later) and how this contributes to their intangible cultural value through analysis of two blunderbusses on either side of the Atlantic. Ellen Fogel Walker is the Public Affairs Coordinator at Culloden Battlefield for the National Trust for Scotland in Inverness, United Kingdom. Her work focuses on advocating for strengthened protection of battlefield landscapes in Britain using public memory and collections to demonstrate their outstanding value.
10:00-10:30am Building an American Identity on the Mid-Atlantic Frontier in the 1760s—Much has been written about the transition of colonists from British subjects to Americans, but few scholars examine this transition on the frontier. This presentation explores how colonists on the mid-Atlantic frontier navigated the aftershocks of the Seven Years’ War by forging an inter-colonial identity, often in opposition to British soldiers. Dr. Jay Donis is an Assistant Professor of History at Thiel College.
10:45-11:30am The Six Nations Confronts the French and Indian War: Joseph Brant Versus Han Yerry—During pre-Columbian times, the Five (later Six) Nations of Iroquois Indians formed what became their powerful League of Peace and Power. This alliance promised internal harmony as well as unity of purpose in dealing with those troublesome peoples external to the Confederacy. Overall, the League alliance remained firm to its purpose until small internal fissures became evident during and immediately after the French and Indian War. Emerging differences between young Mohawk leader Brant and the older Oneida warrior Han Yerry personify the factors pointing toward the decline and eventual collapse of the League, from which the once powerful Confederacy would never fully recover. Dr. James Kirby Martin is a widely published historian who co-authored Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution and has served as a historian advisor to the Oneida Indian Nation of New York.
11:30-1:45pm Lunch Break (Box lunch from America’s Fort Café included).
1:00-1:30pm Book Signing at the Museum Store in the Log House.
2:00-3:00pm John Bradstreet’s Raid 1758: A Revisionist Assessment—Military historian Ian McCulloch attempts to dispel many of the myths that have grown up around the famous 1758 operation against Fort Frontenac (Kingston, Ontario) which preceded Robert Rogers’ raid by a year. Commanded by the “Battoe-Master General,” Jean Baptiste Bradstreet, an “American-born” British regular, it was carried out principally by American provincials from New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York. The Goose Van Schaick Orderly Book from the Fort Ticonderoga Museum collections will be highlighted, as well as French sources added to the mix, to give a more balanced unvarnished account of the raid than Bradstreet’s personal version. McCulloch will also discuss the riverine operational capability that Bradstreet honed and put in place, a new water-borne style of combat that the British-American army would soon successfully deploy in the campaigns of Niagara (1759) and Montreal (1760). Lt. Col. Ian Macpherson McCulloch (ret) is the former Director of the Canadian Forces’ Centre for National Security Studies in Toronto and former CO of Canada’s Black Watch in Montreal. Colonel McCulloch has spoken at the War College on several previous occasions on a variety of topics. Purchase his book John Bradstreet’s Raid, 1758: A Riverine Operation of the French and Indian War now!
3:15-3:45pm Simeon Piscevic (Simeon Piščević), general and diplomat of the era of the Seven Years’ War—Simeon Piscevic (1731-1797) was a Serb who began his military service in the Austrian army during the War of the Austrian Succession. He then transferred to the Russian services, where he rose to the rank of general. During the Seven Years’ War in the Russian military services, numerous Serbian officers would share the same fate as Simeon Piscevic. Destinies of these officers, and the entire Serbian people, were determined by the relations between Russia and Austria, two allies in the Seven Years’ War and the following decades of the 18th century. Dr. Djordje Djuric is a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, Serbia, where he teaches world history of the 18th and 19th centuries. He studies, among other things, Serbian-Russian relations in that period.
4:00-5:00pm Fort Ticonderoga Museum, King’s Garden, and Museum Store open.
5:00pm Dinner at America’s Fort Café (pre-registration only).
