Virtual Author Series featuring Theodore Corbett

The Fort Ticonderoga Author Series features presentations by authors of books related to Colonial and Revolutionary War history.

Another revolution existed in the late 18^th-century world, not the familiar movement for independence of the United States or even the French Revolution, but rather the effort for freedom from slavery, opposed by most in the thirteen British colonies that sought independence. Although Africans and African Americans have been left out of most accounts of these momentous years, The Promise of Freedom for Slaves Escaping in British Ships: The Emancipation Revolution, 1740-1807 pieces together their emerging path toward freedom.  It concerns their part in the revolution, which advanced from the thriving slave trade to the War for Independence, ending in the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire. To Blacks, this Emancipation Revolution on the part of Britain rang out more loudly than the Declaration of Independence.

Theodore Corbett is a scholar of the American Revolutionary War, an interest that grew during a career in teaching at several universities. He has published the award-winning No Turning Point, The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective, and two community studies of the war, Revolutionary New Castle and Revolutionary Chestertown. This book on the Emancipation Revolution grew from the last chapter of his A Maritime History of the American Revolutionary War. He has done research at the Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Archives Centre, The Maritime Museum of Liverpool, and the New York Historical Society as a Gilder Lehrman Fellow. He resides on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.  

Your participation in these online programs through the Center for Digital History supports Fort Ticonderoga’s mission to preserve, educate, and provoke an active discussion about the past and its importance to present and future generations.