Note: Presenting via Zoom as part of the Smithsonian Associates program.

Both sides in the American Revolution knew the importance of firearms, artillery, and swords in making war. From the familiar “Brown Bess” flintlock musket to the innovative breech-loading Ferguson rifle, and from smuggled French guns to domestically made swords, Revolutionary-era weapons teach us a lot about how people experienced the war and the ways in which the Patriots and the British sought to win by supplying weapons as much as by actually fighting with them. Kenneth Cohen, the National Museum of American History’s curator of early America, examines how each side strove to supply their forces with weapons that could help them win the war. He explores how these arms illuminate new dimensions of the American Revolution, telling a larger story about the lives of ordinary men, advances in technology, and the web of trade in which it all happened.