Hugh Hughes' Debts and the Stories we Tell About the American Revolution
24sep5:30 pm8:00 pmHugh Hughes' Debts and the Stories we Tell About the American RevolutionFree
Event Details
Hugh Hughes’ Debts and the Stories We Tell
Event Details
Hugh Hughes’ Debts and the Stories We Tell About the American Revolution
with David Waldstreicher
Thursday, September 24th, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Please join us on the evening of September 24th for a lecture by author and professor David Waldstreiche
The relationship between private debts, political economy, and patriot politics has vexed historians for more than a century. Hugh Hughes, an artisan and schoolteacher and one of the first Sons of Liberty in New York, found that his avid participation in the long Revolutionary process and its settlement got him into and out of debt repeatedly. This talk will explore Hughes’ experience of debt in relation to his radical politics and will suggest that following both the money and the rhetoric yields insights into the relationship between injustice and politicization and may even put into dialogue interpretations of the Revolution that seem incompatible.
David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through Revolution and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians and the George Washington Book Prize. He is also the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification; Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution; and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997) (Hill and Wang, 2009).
