Join us for the opening talk for the special exhibition, Moravians and the Revolution. During the illustrated talk, Scott Gordon will provide insights into the pacifist Moravian community during the time of the Revolutionary War. The American Revolution put Pennsylvania’s Moravians in a tough place. They wanted to remain neutral, but Patriots demanded that they choose a side and threatened to seize all their property if they didn’t. When military forces—troops on the move, prisoners, injured soldiers—occupied Bethlehem (“engulfed” the small community, John Ettwein said), Moravians had no choice but to transform the way they lived. These communities did survive these dangerous times. But, as this talk will explore, the Revolution transformed Bethlehem permanently.

 

Scott Gordon is a professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Chair at Lehigh University. Gordon's book The Letters of Mary Penry: A Single Moravian Woman in Early America was published in 2018. His current research focuses on slavery and other forms of unfreedom in early Bethlehem and, more generally, on religion, social ambition, and patriotism in colonial and revolutionary Pennsylvania.  ​​