Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Dr. Alan Taylor will present the Gary R. Hess Lecture in Policy History Thursday, Nov. 5 from 5-7:30 p.m. in the multiourpose room (228) in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union on the BGSU campus.
Presented by the BGSU Department of History, Taylor’s lecture will address “Completing the Revolution: Western Expansion, Foreign Entanglements and Internal Conflicts, 1783-1796.”
The end of the War of the American Revolution provided the new United States with a vast western territory that was potentially either a windfall or a curse. To gain full control, the new nation felt driven to suppress Native nations and fend off their British and Spanish allies.
During the 1780s, that struggle produced a crisis that nearly blew apart the tenuous union of the states and led to the push for a new constitution meant to endow the nation with the means to control and develop the West.
Taylor’s scholarship focuses on the Revolutionary era, frontier settlements, slavery, and the Civil War period. His latest book, released in September 2026, “Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion,”examines the context of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion. which began airing in the fall of 2025.
He served as an advisor for Ken Burns’s PBS documentary “The American Revolution,”
Taylor has authored twelve books on early American history, including “William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic “(1995) and “The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia” (2013), both of which won Pulitzer Prizes, and his 2021 work “American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850” received the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize.
