About

Join the Historical Society of Western Virginia, which operates both the Roanoke History and O. Winston Link Museums, for its annual fundraiser at Hotel Roanoke, Roanoke, Virginia, on September 18, 2025. Enjoy cocktails, silent and live auctions, dinner, book signing, and a lecture from bestselling author Andrew Lawler, as he speaks on his most recent book "A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis that Spurred the American Revolution."

As the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded far to the south that proved every bit as decisive as the battles of Lexington and Concord in uniting the colonies against Britain. Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, and most populous province in British North America, was governed by Lord Dunmore, a pugnacious Scottish earl. Outgunned and outmanned, he allied with the colony’s enslaved Africans, who made up two of every five Virginians and were eager to gain their freedom. Dunmore emancipated those who would fight for King George III and sent them into battle against their patriot owners as part of the first corps of Black soldiers in American history. The crisis that gripped Virginia in 1775 and 1776 has long been relegated to the background by historians, in part because it is the story of two liberty-seeking groups of Americans fighting against one another. Chronicling these stunning and widely overlooked events in full for the first time, A Perfect Frenzy offers a striking new perspective on the American Revolution that reorients our understanding of its causes, highlights the radically different motivations between patriots in the North and South, and reveals the seeds of the nation’s racial divide.

Lawler, an award winning journalist, has written four books, including prize winning Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, as well as the bestseller The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. He regularly contributes to The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Archaeology Magazines.

Tickets for the event are $125 per person, and a sponsor table of 10 is $1,500. Sponsor tables enjoy valet parking as well as additional drink tickets for everyone at your table. We also have the speaker table available for 8 at $2,000.

Tickets to this signature event can be purchased through the museum's website, or by calling 540.982.5465.