Upcoming Events
Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution featuring Molly Beer
Date and Time
Thursday, January 29, 2026 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
RSVP
You can RSVP for this event
Location
Charles W. Loosemore Auditorium, DeVos Center
Description
Join Molly Beer as she presents her new work exploring the extraordinary life of Angelica Schuyler Church, a revolutionary thinker, influential sister-in-law to Alexander Hamilton, and witness to the political and cultural upheavals of her time.
About the Book
Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church, who occupied the red-hot center of the movement to forge a new nation. Angelica Church was more than Alexander Hamilton’s “saucy” sister-in-law, the Marquis de Lafayette’s “amiable friend,” or the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s “charming coterie” of artists and salonnières in Paris. Her transatlantic network of important friends spanned the political spectrum of her time and place.
Where was her place? Born Engeltje in the Dutch-speaking colonial outpost of Albany, Angelica would have many homes over the course of a life flung far and wide by war and circumstances. From Albany to New York, Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Yorktown, Paris, London, and even the western frontier, from homes grand and simple, Angelica plied her significant influence for the sake of her friends, family, and country. “What are Kings and Queens to an American who has seen a Washington,” Angelica wrote home from England, where she lived as a prominent American for more than a decade, facilitating diplomacy and enacting the post-war peace.
Across nationalities, languages, and cultures, across the divides of war, grievance, and geography, Angelica wove a web of soft-power connections that spanned the War for Independence, the post-war years of tenuous peace, and the turbulent politics and rival ideologies that threatened to tear apart the nascent United States. Women’s roles in history are so often lost to dust and time. But Angelica’s love and labor shine through in this vivid telling of a charismatic woman navigating the American Revolution, the turbulent years of the U.S. Founding, and the creation of a nation premised on the notion that E pluribus unum.
About Molly Beer
Molly Beer’s work as a writer and international teacher led her to Europe, Asia, Central and South America, and elsewhere. But her debut book is a homecoming, both to the U.S. and to her rural American hometown of Angelica, New York. By researching and writing the life and experiences of the ambitious, charismatic Angelica Schuyler Church, who inspired much more than her town’s name, Molly Beer set out to tell the U.S. origin story from the perspective of a woman situated at the heart of the American Revolution and the founding era.
Angelica joins Molly Beer’s body of award-winning nonfiction that grapples with the politics of place, from travel and the environment to women’s history. She has served as an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and currently teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
This event also appears on the main events calendar tagged as grandforum, and hauenstein.