The National Army Museum welcomes Dr. Glenn Williams to discuss one of America’s last colonial conflicts: Lord Dunmore’s War. This 1774 campaign against a Shawnee-led Indian confederacy in the Ohio Country marked the final time an American colonial militia took to the field in the king’s service and under royal command. Led by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, a force of colonials successfully enforced the western border established by treaties in parts of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. The campaign is often neglected in histories, despite its major influence on the conduct of the Revolutionary War that followed. Award-winning historian Glenn Williams will discuss the course and importance of this campaign, supported by extensive primary source research to correct much of the folklore concerning the war and frontier fighting in general. He demonstrates that the Americans did not adopt Indian tactics for wilderness fighting as is often supposed, but rather used British methods developed for fighting irregulars in the woods of Europe, while incorporating certain techniques learned from the Indians and experience gained from earlier colonial wars.

Glenn F. Williams is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C. He has served as the historian of the National Museum of the U.S. Army Project, the Army Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commemoration, and the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland.

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