KINGSTON, R.I. – Nov. 4, 2026 – Society looks toward the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in World War II, the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and missile attacks that endangered Ukraine’s nuclear power plants when it considers war significantly impacting the environment.

But what about war in the 1700s? How did the American Revolution affect the natural world? How did the natural world impact the American Revolution? 

David Hsiung, professor emeritus of history at Juanita College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, will explain how the natural environment is affected by violent conflict during the University of Rhode Island’s American Revolutions lecture series. Hsiung’s lecture, titled “Environmental Legacies: How the War of Independence Affected the Natural World in Predictable and Surprising Ways,” will be held Thursday, Nov. 12, at 4 p.m., in the Hope Room of the Robert J. Higgins Welcome Center, 45 Upper College Road, on the Kingston Campus. 

Hsiung’s talk will focus on three case studies—the encampment of the Continental Army at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-1778, the British forces raiding Martha’s Vineyard in September 1778, and the Battle of Saratoga in upstate New York in 1777. These studies will offer a fresh way to think about the American Revolution and its legacies and a useful perspective on war and the natural world.

The yearlong lecture series, hosted by the URI Center for the Humanities, focuses on how the American Revolution has shaped the United States since gaining its independence from Great Britain in 1776, and how different groups over time have used the ideas of the American Revolution to push their own ideas of freedom. The series is co-sponsored by the URI College of Arts and Sciences, the Division of Research and Economic Development, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Women’s Center. 

Hsiung’s presentation will also be livestreamed through the lecture series’ website.

A Chicago native, Hsiung won the 2008 Theodore C. Blegen Award from the Forest History Society for his New England Quarterly piece, “Food, Fuel, and the New England Environment in the War for Independence, 1775-1776.” He is currently working on a book that examines environmental history and the War of Independence.

Hsiung’s lecture will be followed by a talk on Dec. 9 by Linford Fisher, a professor of history at Brown University, about Indigenous slavery and dispossession during the War of Independence. 

The full speaker roster can be found on the lecture series’ website. The series will conclude on Thursday, April 8, with a talk on the rise and fall of the Second American Republic.

The annual signature yearlong lecture series, hosted by the University’s Center for the Humanities, is free and open to the public. A digital archive of last year’s lecture series can be found on the humanities center’s website. For more information on the series, email uri.humanities@gmail.com.