Profs & Pints Baltimore: George Washington Never Declared Independence

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “George Washington Never Declared Independence,” an exploration of our first president’s evolving American identity, with Denver Brunsman, associate professor of history at George Washington University and scholar of the American Revolution and early American republic.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating.]

With our nation’s 250th anniversary approaching, it’s time for a fresh assessment of one of the key figures who got the ball rolling.

Trace the unconventional steps that George Washington took in embracing American citizenship, separate from his status as a British colonial subject, with historian Denver Brunsman, a Profs and Pints fan favorite and the author of the forthcoming book George Washington and His World: Enslaver, Revolutionary, President.

It will be the ninth time Professor Brunsman has given an annual talk tied to Presidents’ Day and George Washington’s Birthday, and each has been a blast, featuring odes to America’s first president and ending in historic toasts.

You’ll learn how George Washington missed the fiery debates that marked the political process culminating in Congress approving independence on July 2, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence two days later. That’s because he had been leading the Continental Army against British forces for the past year. As a result, Washington never signed the Declaration or, for that matter, formally declared independence.

Instead, Washington had followed a more evolutionary path to an American identity. The process began during the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763 and continued during the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, when he traded tobacco for wheat as the primary cash crop at Mount Vernon. It crystalized in his command of American forces.

The upshot was that Washington embraced a separate American identity months, even years, before most of his fellow revolutionaries. You’ll embrace learning history after hearing Denver Brunsman discuss this founding father’s fight for freedom. (Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating.)