History & Art Series: This summer when America is celebrating its 250th anniversary, join us for this historical and civic education program to learn how the Berkshires played a pivotal role in the founding of our nation.
“American Stories: Rebels and Revolutionaries of the Berkshires” examines the history of the American Revolution and its reverberating echoes in the region, nation, and world by highlighting the fascinating but complicated biographies of Berkshire County residents who impacted American history and culture from the late 1700s onward.
Sign up for the entire series of five classes held at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Each class will begin in the galleries of Norman Rockwell Museum’s “American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell” with a discussion of a work on view that connects to the theme of that day’s class.
Course Instructor: Justin F. Jackson is a lecturer and visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Classes and lectures include:
1) “Declarations of Independence”: Theodore Sedgwick, the Sheffield Resolves, and the Rise of Protest in the Berkshires
2) “Our America”: Daniel Nimham, the Stockbridge Mohicans, and the Revolution’s “Missing Indians”
3) “I Am, Amen”: Black Freedom Struggles in the Berkshires, from Agrippa Hull and Elizabeth Freeman to Samuel Harrison and W.E.B. Du Bois
4) “Do Unto Others”: Rev. Thomas Allen, Shays’s Rebellion, and a Sovereign People’s Constitutions in Massachusetts and America
5) “The Real Thing”: Herman Melville, the Magic of Memory, and Representing the American Dream
About Justin F. Jackson
Justin F. Jackson is a lecturer and visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he teaches US history, and the history of Boston and Massachusetts. The Berkshire Eagle is publishing his monthly column, “Revolution: Berkshires,” on the American Revolution’s local history in the run-up to the semi-sesquicentennial in July 2026. A scholar of US foreign relations history, he is author of The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). His next book, “Cherry Cottage: Between Ruin and Restoration, America’s History Retold through a Berkshire Home,” explores how a preserved Stockbridge home produced Americans’ sense of the past, and nation, through place.
