Author Talk: Robert Hubbard

In celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the library is hosting Robert Hubbard the author of Major General Israel Putnam: Hero of the American Revolution.

A colorful figure of 18th-century America, Israel Putnam (1718–1790) played key roles in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. During the former, he barely escaped from being burned alive by Mohawk warriors and was held by the French as a prisoner of war in Canada. He later commanded a force of 500 men that was shipwrecked off the coast of Cuba. During the Revolutionary War, it was Putnam who reportedly gave the command “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was also a historian, once stated it “could be argued that we owe our national existence to the fortifications which General Israel Putnam threw up in April 1776 on the Buttermilk Channel side [of New York’s Governors Island], which is just a baseball’s throw from Brooklyn Heights.” Robert Ernest Hubbard’s book, the first full-length biography of Putnam in more than a century, re-examines the life of a general whose seniority in the Continental Army was second only to that of George Washington. This talk will cover Putnam’s personal life and military career, including his service in eastern New York State in the French and Indian War and in Connecticut during the American Revolutionary War. Special attention will be paid to the Redding, Connecticut encampment of General Putnam’s division of the Continental Army during the winter of 1778-1779.

Robert Ernest Hubbard is a retired professor from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut, and an adjunct faculty member in the college’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. In addition to Major General Israel Putnam: Hero of the American Revolution, he is the author of eleven other books including The Last Survivors, A History of Connecticut’s Deadliest Tornadoes, and this year’s Major General Thomas Mifflin: The Army’s First Quartermaster General and the First Governor of Pennsylvania.