Teaching the Revolution at Harvard

I teach the Revolution in buildings that housed Revolutionary soldiers. Massachusetts Hall, where my office is, served as barracks in 1775. Students find this remarkable—that the institution continued, transformed but unbroken, from a college disrupted by war to a university that studies that war. Cambridge's Revolutionary role was administrative rather than dramatic. No battle occurred here. But the decisions made at Washington's headquarters shaped everything that followed. The siege was won not by assault but by organization, patience, and the arrival of Knox's artillery.