About

Presented by Dr. Will Mackintosh, Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington. Looking backwards, the political decision to break with Great Britain and declare independence looks obvious. Because we all know what happened over the next 250 years, the independence of some of the North American colonies has taken on an air of inevitability. But it wasn’t so obvious to people at the time. This talk explores the politics of Virginia in the mid-1770s to understand who was pushing for independence, why they did so, and how they ultimately won the argument.

Dr. Will Mackintosh is a cultural and social historian of the 19th century United States, with particular interests in the history of leisure, the history of crime, and the cultural history of capitalism. He is the author of Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture.