An Evening with Kathleen DuVal at the Delaware History Museum
Schedule
Wed Dec 03 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Delaware History Museum and Mitchell Center for African American Heritage | Wilmington, DE
About this Event
Huxley & Hiro and the Delaware Historical Society are thrilled to host author Kathleen DuVal for a conversation about her award winning book, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.
About the Author:
Kathleen DuVal is a professor in the History Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Independence Lost and The Native Ground, and has written for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and for the Wall Street Journal. Her most recent book, Native Nations, won the 2024 Cundill History Prize.
Book Description:
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian offers a significant new global perspective on the Revolutionary War with the story of the conflict as seen through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society
Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Now, in Independence Lost, she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
While citizens of the thirteen rebelling colonies came to blows with the British Empire over tariffs and parliamentary representation, the situation on the rest of the continent was even more fraught. In the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish forces clashed with Britain’s strained army to carve up the Gulf Coast, as both sides competed for allegiances with the powerful Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations who inhabited the region. Meanwhile, African American slaves had little control over their own lives, but some individuals found opportunities to expand their freedoms during the war.
Independence Lost reveals that individual motives counted as much as the ideals of liberty and freedom the Founders espoused: Independence had a personal as well as national meaning, and the choices made by people living outside the colonies were of critical importance to the war’s outcome. DuVal introduces us to the Mobile slave Petit Jean, who organized militias to fight the British at sea; the Chickasaw diplomat Payamataha, who worked to keep his people out of war; New Orleans merchant Oliver Pollock and his wife, Margaret O’Brien Pollock, who risked their own wealth to organize funds and garner Spanish support for the American Revolution; the half-Scottish-Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, who fought to protect indigenous interests from European imperial encroachment; the Cajun refugee Amand Broussard, who spent a lifetime in conflict with the British; and Scottish loyalists James and Isabella Bruce, whose work on behalf of the British Empire placed them in grave danger. Their lives illuminate the fateful events that took place along the Gulf of Mexico and, in the process, changed the history of North America itself.
Adding new depth and moral complexity, Kathleen DuVal reinvigorates the story of the American Revolution. Independence Lost is a bold work that fully establishes the reputation of a historian who is already regarded as one of her generation’s best.
Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award • Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey History Prize • Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize
About the Moderator:
Nikki Locklear (Lumbee) is a third-year doctoral student whose research interests center on 18th and 19th century Native American histories in what is currently the U.S. South. Within these broad categories, her areas of inquiry include community coalescence and belonging as well as the historical racialization of Native and Afro-Native peoples in the Upper South during the early republic and removal periods. Her primary advisor is Juliana Barr. She is also a member of the University Scholars Program and the Society of Duke Fellows. She graduated with a B.A. in History from Brown University in 2020. Her undergraduate honors thesis, initiated as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow project, explored Lumbee political struggles in the 20th century and received a departmental prize.
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
All Ages
Free Entrance, Registration Required
Where is it happening?
Delaware History Museum and Mitchell Center for African American Heritage, 504 North Market Street, Wilmington, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
