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Name: Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War - a American 250th MTHS and MFL History Lecture Series
Start: 2026-10-21T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-10-21T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Community Collaboration Space

Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War - a American 250th MTHS and MFL History Lecture Series

Wednesday, October 21 at 6:00 p.m.

Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War

by Friederike Baer, PhD, Professor of History and Division Head for Arts and Humanities, Penn State Abington author of Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Between 1776 and 1783, Great Britain hired more than thirty thousand German soldiers to fight in its war against the American rebels. Collectively known as Hessians, the soldiers and accompanying civilians, including hundreds of women and children, spent extended periods of time in locations as dispersed and varied as Canada in the North and West Florida in the South. This presentation highlights some of the key experiences of these participants in a war on a distant continent against a people that had done them no harm.

Dr. Friederike Baer is Associate Professor of History and Division Head for Arts and Humanities at Penn State Abington College. Her publications include Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022), for which she was awarded the 2023 Society of the Cincinnati Book Prize.