Countdown to April 19th, 1775: Acclaimed historian and author Robert Gross joins the Acton 250 Lecture Series to present: Acton’s and Concord’s Roads to Revolution

Wednesday, October 23rd, 7PM in Room 204, Acton Town Hall, 472 Main Street, Acton MA                            

Acton and Concord joined together on April 19, 1775, at the North Bridge, igniting the War of Independence along different paths to revolution rooted in their separate histories. This talk highlights the two communities over the decade 1765-1775 from the Stamp Act to the Massachusetts Government Act.  It focuses on the conflicts and changes Acton and Concord experienced in their economic and social lives including population pressures on land, challenges to patriarchy by couples seeking greater freedom to make their own marriages, demands for an end to slavery by people of color, and increasing inequality and insecurity in New England society. This story of  change will draw on the author’s Bancroft Prize-winning “The Minutemen and Their World”, first published in 1976 (reissued in 2022). The talk also examines the extent to which the break with Britain changed the towns. How revolutionary was the Revolution?

Bob Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. A specialist in the social and cultural history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, Gross focuses particularly on New England. His first book, The Minutemen and Their World, presents a community study of Concord, Massachusetts in the eighteenth century tracing the internal conflicts that shaped the town’s participation in the mobilization against British rule. Minutemen received the Bancroft Prize in American History. His studies of the Revolutionary period continued in the edited collection In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (1993). Prof. Gross’s latest book is The Transcendentalists and Their World, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best books of 2021.

Remote Participation: You can participate in the Q&A using ZOOM http://tinyurl.com/Acton250-ZOOM or watch live at Acton TV http://tinyurl.com/Acton-TV.

Recordings will be on our website and ActonTV after the event. Please see https://www.actonma.gov/250 for all programming information and a link to our commemorative store.

Generously supported by the Acton Lions Club.