“A Raging Whirlwind”:  The Revolutionary War and Native Americans

Please note that the series package includes all 7 lectures taking place every Monday from January 26 to March 9, 2026. Tickets for single lectures will be available beginning December 1, 2025

​The Revolutionary War for Native Americans was like “a raging whirlwind which tears up the trees,” as a Seneca leader named Honayawas described it in 1798.  Although Americans have typically focused on the more conventional clashes among American, British, French, and Spanish armies along North America’s seaboard, there was a more destructive and brutal theater of the Revolutionary War that unfolded along America’s western frontier.  There, Native Americans remained both independent and crucial players in the war, as both the British and Americans competed for the alliance and military strength of Indian peoples.  The outcome of the Revolutionary War on the frontier shaped the future of North America for generations to follow.

Dr. David Preston is the General Mark W. Clark Distinguished Chair of History at The Citadel and specializes in early American history and American Indian history.  He is the author of several books, including The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783 (2009) and Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution (2015), winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History and several literary awards as well as a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.