Profiles of 1776 | Nathan Hale
Week of October 19
Standing beneath the noose fashioned for him and beside his freshly dug grave, Captain Nathan Hale uttered some of the most famous words in American history. Valorous, undefeated...
Profiles of 1776 | Richard Stockton
Week of October 12
Before war came to the thirteen colonies, Richard Stockton of New Jersey, the first from that state to sign the Declaration of Independence, stood at the pinnacle of his legal, social, and...
Profiles of 1776 | John Witherspoon
Week of October 10
It was a distinguished feature of the American Revolution that religious feeling was closely connected with political action. This manifested in the galvanizing effects of the Great Awakening...
Profiles of 1776 | Susannah Elliot
Week of September 28
On the twenty-eighth of June, 1776, Susannah Elliot watched from shore with crowds of fellow onlookers as an enormous British fleet tried to force their way into Charleston Harbor, pummeling the patriot’s...
Profiles of 1776 | Arthur Middleton
Week of August 31
South Carolina produced many glittering names in the founding generation, but few embodied the colony’s contradictions as completely as Arthur Middleton. Heir to one of the...
Profiles of 1776 | William Moultrie
Week of August 24
South Carolina—that most glamorous, contradictory, diverse of American colonies—was considered to be the emotional leader of the southern colonies during the founding years. Not…
Profiles of 1776 | Thomas Paine
Week of August 17
A consummate “atrocity propagandist,” no single individual influenced American perceptions to a greater degree in the year 1776 than English-born essayist Thomas Paine. In January of that…
Profiles of 1776 | Elizabeth Annesley Lewis
Week of August 10
In the course of Providence, when Elizabeth Lewis’ husband, Francis, put his name to the Declaration of Independence, he signed away not only his own life but—most tangibly—hers as well. He…
Profiles of 1776 | John Hancock
Week of August 3
While reduced in national memory to little more than his unapologetically large signature at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, the life and contributions of John Hancock to our…
Profiles of 1776 | Richard Henry Lee
Week of June 29
In an era that expected its statesmen not only to hold defensible positions but to articulate them with eloquence worthy of the stage, Richard Henry Lee earned the moniker “The Cicero of Virginia.”