All year New York Almanack and the Ben Franklin’s World podcast have explored the American Revolution from many vantage points, from its politics and battles to the experiences of women, enslaved and free people of color, Native Americans, and Loyalists.
The latest Ben Franklin’s World podcast episode takes a new lens to the Revolution, an LGBTQ lens, to ask: what does the history of the American Revolution and its legacy look like through LGBTQ history?
Guest historians Rachel Hope Cleves, Jen Manion and John McCurdy explore how LGBTQ+ people took part in the Revolution and how its legacy shaped LGBTQ+ lives in the new United States.
Rachel Hope Cleves is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She is the author of Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (2016), the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, two women who lived openly as a married couple in Weybridge, Vermont between 1807 and Charity’s death in 1851.
Jen Manion is a Professor of History and of Sexuality and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College, studies the history of queer and gender-non-conforming culture in early America. Manion is the author of the award-winning book, Female Husbands: A Trans History (2020).
John McCurdy is a Professor of History and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University and the author of Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh (2024) explores these questions through the remarkable story of British Army Chaplain Robert Newburgh.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Ben Franklin’s World is an award-winning podcast. It’s for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our world.
Each episode features an interview with a historian who shares their unique insights into our early American past. It is a production of the Clio Digital Media.
More About the American Revolution in New York
Illustration: An engraving by George Graham for the Frontispiece of John Adams Vinton’s The Female Review: Life of Deborah Sampson, the Female Soldier in the War of Revolution (1866).
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