Historian James B. Conroy joins Local History Librarian Amy Lafave to discuss his new book, Hingham in the Revolution: Not the Gift of Kings.
What was the experience of a small town in the colony of Massachusetts Bay during the American Revolution? Location plays a role. Hingham, located on the South Shore near Boston, was settled in 1633, one hundred years before the first European settlement in the Berkshires. Lenox, founded in 1767, was just establishing itself as a community. Still, some similarities may be found in the response of each community when the first shots fired at Lexington.
Join us for a conversation illuminating revolution in two small Massachusetts towns, from the sea to the wilderness.
Photo by David Welch
James B. Conroy is an award-winning author of narrative history and an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His books include Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865; Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime; Jefferson’s White House: Monticello on the Potomac; The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan that Won the War; and, most recently, Hingham in the American Revolution: Not the Gift of Kings, a character-driven story of the coastal Massachusetts town and its people in the Revolutionary War and the rebellion that preceded it.
Conroy has spoken at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois; the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York; the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; The Boston Athenaeum; The World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana; Renaissance Weekend in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Ottawa, and many other venues in the United States and Canada.
He lives with his wife of 53 years, Lynn Fitzgerald Conroy, in Hingham, Massachusetts, where he is Town Historian.