Think you’ve heard it all about the American Revolution? Think again!
Robert Sullivan, contributing editor of Vogue, has done some poking around, and he will share some amusing findings from his book, My American Revolution, at the Morristown & Township Library on Thursday, Nov. 15.
The talk is free and starts at 7 pm, at the library on 1 Miller Road in Morristown. Copies of the book will be available for $27.50.
Here’s how the library describes this presentation:
My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78
With Vogue Contributing Editor, author and “Revolutionary” traveler Robert Sullivan
MORRISTOWN, NJ— Join us on Thursday, November 15, at 7:00 p.m. at the Morristown & Morris Township Library, as Vogue contributing editor Robert Sullivan describes his many adventures as he moves through the calendar of American independence, considering the weather and the tides, the harbor and the estuary and the yearly return of the stars as salient factors in the war for independence. In this fiercely individual and often hilarious journey to make our revolution his, Sullivan shows us how alive our own history is, right under our noses. Refreshments will be served and copies of My American Revolution will be available for purchase for $27.50.
Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians, but in fact the war took place mostly in the Middle Colonies—in New York and New Jersey and the parts of Pennsylvania that on a clear day you can almost see from the Empire State Building. In his new book, My American Revolution, Robert Sullivan delves into this first Middle America, digging for a glorious, heroic part of the past in the urban, suburban, and sometimes even rural landscape of today.
In this talk, Sullivan will recount great adventures along the way: investigating the true history of the crossing of the Delaware, its down-home reenactment each year for the past half a century, and—toward the end of a personal odyssey that involves camping in New Jersey backyards, hiking through lost “mountains,” and eventually some physical therapy—evacuating illegally from Brooklyn to Manhattan by handmade boat.
My American Revolution recounts a Brooklyn historian’s failed attempt to memorialize a colonial Maryland regiment; a tattoo artist’s more successful use of a colonial submarine, which resulted in his 2007 arrest by the New York City police and the FBI; and the life of Philip Freneau, the first (and not great) poet of American independence, who died in a swamp in the snow. Last but not least, along New York harbor, Sullivan re-creates an ancient signal beacon.
Robert Sullivan is the author of Rats, The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, and most recently, The Thoreau You Don’t Know. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, A Public Space and Vogue, where he is a contributing editor. He was born in Manhattan and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
