Lecture: When the United States Spoke French

The Department of History  within Florida Atlantic University's Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters presents "When the United States Spoke French," a lecture with Fran?ois Fustenberg, Ph.D., associate professor of U.S. history at Johns Hopkins University. The lecture will take place on Thursday, March 12 at 3 p.m. in the Wimberly Library, fifth floor, 777 Glades Road, FAU's Boca Raton campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Furstenberg has published two books focused on the era of the American Revolution and early national period.  His first, "In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation" (2006), examined how a complex and evolving image of George Washington in 19th-century print culture promoted U.S. nationalism, and what the image of Washington's slaveholding had to say about the relationship between slavery and nationalism in the post-revolutionary period. 

His second, "When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nation" (2014), seeks to connect the United States to the French Atlantic World in the 18th-century Age of Revolutions. It follows a group of French émigrés who fled the French Revolution and settled in Philadelphia, where they integrated into some of the most exalted political and financial networks of the young nation.

Also on display at the time of the lecture will be materials from the Marvin & Sybil Weiner Spirit of America Collection, a permanent exhibition in FAU's Wimberly Library.

The lecture is sponsored by Dr. Howard and Judith Weiner and the departments of history and languages, linguistics and comparative literature.

For more information, contact Zella Linn at zlinn@fau.edu.