Virtual Lecture – Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City,

Join us for a virtual lecture all about the Loyalists of New York with author Christopher Minty!

Drawn largely from his recent book, Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City, Minty’s talk addresses the complicated relationships between loyalists and patriots in New York City.

For New York loyalists, it was local politics, factions, institutions, and behaviors that governed their political activities in the build up to the American Revolution. By focusing on political culture, organization, and patterns of allegiance, Minty will explore the contending allegiances of loyalists and patriots were all but locked in place by 1775 when British troops marched out of Boston to seize caches of weapons in neighboring villages.

Christopher F. Minty is managing editor and project director of Naval Documents of the American Revolution at the Center for Digital Editing, University of Virginia. He is author of Unfriendly to Liberty: Loyalist Networks and the Coming of the American Revolution in New York City (2023) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

This lecture, as are all our lectures for 2026, has been generously sponsored by Preston Pitman, and Tim Wallach & Fleur Fairman.