Dr. Scott Stephenson
speaker
278 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Jul
Dr. Scott Stephenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
George Washington's tent is always on display, and you'll always see a printing of the Declaration of Independence, either a broadside printing or a newspaper printing from the summer of 1776.
One of my favorite, it's actually two objects in the museum, is a little pair of red baby shoes made from red wool cloth.
that were made by the wife of a Revolutionary War veteran who comes back after serving through the entire Revolutionary War.
It was a man by the name of James Davenport from just outside of Boston.
And when he comes home at the end of the war in 1783, he brings with him a captured British red coat kind of as a souvenir.
And he marries upon coming home, marries his sweetheart.
They have their first child, a son, the following year.
And they cut out a little pair of these baby shoes from this British soldier's coat.
And to me, they symbolize that beating swords into plowshares, you know, this revolutionary generation that is engaged in this audacious idea of creating a nation in which the people are sovereign and the people secure their own rights, and against all odds, they succeed.
And the long-suffering soldiers who return at the end of that conflict with dreams of the future
You know, it's embodied in the birth of a child.
And so for me, that little pair of baby shoes really sets the hair on the back of my neck standing on end every time I see them on display in the museum.
One of the important messages for the museum is that the Revolutionary War and the American Revolution are related, but they are not synonyms.
And this is something that the revolutionary generation wrote about and actually sort of debated a little bit about, well, what do we mean when we say the words American Revolution?
They separated it from the military conflict.
They recognized that the war was revolutionary, but it was not the same thing as the American Revolution.
John Adams, very famously in an 1818 letter to a publisher, said that,
You know, the American Revolution happened before the war.
It was a change in the hearts and minds of the people.
There was another revolutionary founder, a man named Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, you know, and a member of Congress.
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