“The American Revolution: Subjects, Citizens, and Soldiers”

June 22-27, 2025 & July 27-august 1, 2025

This Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for School Teachers supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities explores the American Revolution through five themes:

• Power of Place
• Subjects, Citizens, Service
• Revolutionary Possibilities
• Shaping Nations, Forging Identities
• Manufacturing Independence

Open to 36 teachers in grades K-12 each week, this workshop at Fort Ticonderoga combines readings, visiting scholars, hands-on work with documents and artifacts, and engagement with historic sites and landscapes.

This NEH Landmarks Workshop for Teachers takes place June 22-27, 2025, and July 27-August 1, 2025. There is no fee for this program and all participants receive a $1,300 stipend to help defray expenses.

Participating teachers can opt to earn three graduate credits in Education through Vermont State University in Castleton, Vermont.

Applications are due March 5, 2025.

Participant notification April 2, 2025.

Participant acceptance deadline April 16, 2025.

Currently, only this home page is updated for the 2025 Landmarks program. Additional pages will be updated by November 15, 2025.

Overview

“The American Revolution: Subjects, Citizens, and Soldiers” will explore the American Revolution, using five themes to connect participants with Fort Ticonderoga’s historic landscapes, archival documents, and a vast collection of objects and artworks. This Landmarks Workshop seeks to encourage teachers as historical thinkers, using these five themes to expand their understanding of the Revolution as more than a military event, but one that impacted social and political history, not just of the new United States, but other nations and peoples.

Ticonderoga is the ideal place to explore this topic with its history and collections. As a 17th- and 18th-century colonial battlefield between Native American powers, the French, and the British, Ticonderoga grounds this study in the lived experience and precedents Americans brought to their own struggle for independence. As one of the most important sites of the American Revolution, Ticonderoga is emblematic of the challenges and stakes of fighting and winning that independence, including who would fight that war, how to create and maintain a diverse military, and how a nation conducts itself at war. Fort Ticonderoga also maintains a nationally significant collection of artifacts and archives from across the early modern Atlantic world that contextualize the events that occurred here, including thousands of rare books, manuscripts, textiles, armaments, and other material spanning the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries.

Key Readings

Key segments of these books support this Landmarks workshop:

• Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 by Ricardo Hererra
• Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution by Holly Mayer
• Congress’ Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union by Holly Mayer
• A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789 by James Kirby Martin
• American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native Communities by Colin Calloway
• Manufacturing Independence: Industrial Innovation in the American Revolution by Robert F. Smith
• A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence by Ray Raphael
• Fort Ticonderoga: The Last Campaigns—The War in the North 1777-1783 by Mark Edward Lender