The Board of Scholars forms the intellectual backbone for development of the American Revolution Center at Valley Forge. Puliltzer prize winning author David McCullough was the founding chairman of this distinguished group of scholars who provide consultation and review of exhibit themes and content for the Center. This group ensures that the story of the American Revolution is told with integrity and accuracy.

Herman Benninghoff is an independent researcher, author, lecturer, and student of the American War of Independence. He has published numerous articles and his first book: Valley Forge: A Genesis for Command and Control, Continental Army Style was published in 2001. Mr. Benninghoff worked on a TV series for Discoveries America and has appeared in the 2003 PBS series History Detectives. He was a script advisor to Terra Nova Television for the Discovery Channel production on Valley Forge. His book was the basis for an interview on C-SPAN, July 6, 2002. The book was a source for the History Channel's Save Our History: Valley Forge in which Mr. Benninghoff appeared as a narrator, author, and historian. In 1995 he was a scriptwriter and appeared as an arms historian in the A&E TV Series: The American Revolution. With his wife Joan, Mr. Benninghoff has assembled an extensive thematic collection from the period of the American Revolution with many items on loan to a variety of major museums.

Thomas Fleming is the author of more than a dozen books on the American Revolution, including highly praised biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, the best-selling novel, Liberty Tavern, and most recently, Liberty! The American Revolution and Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. Fleming is a frequent guest and contributor to NPR, PBS, A&E, the History Channel and the “Today Show.” For ten years he was the Chairman of the American Revolution Roundtable of New York and still serves on its Board of Founders.

John Hattendorf is the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History and Chairman of the Maritime History Department at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. He holds degrees in history from Kenyon College, Brown University, and the University of Oxford, where he earned his D.Phil. at Pembroke College. He has taught at the National University of Singapore and has been a visiting scholar at the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office. The author or editor of more than 30 books and numerous articles, his scholarship in the field of maritime history has been recognized with the awared of an honorary doctorate of humane letters, the Caird Medal o f the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and the K. Jack Bauer Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History.

Pauline Maier is the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at MIT. A Harvard Ph.D. (1968), she has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, (1968-1977) and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she was the Robinson-Edwards Professor of History, before going to MIT in 1978. Her books include From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972); The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980); a junior-high-school textbook, The American People: A History (1986), and American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, which was on the New York Times Book Review editors' choice list of the eleven best books, fiction and nonfiction, of 1997. She contributed the first eight chapters to a new American History textbook, Inventing America, which was published in 2002 by W.W. Norton, and is now studying ratification of the federal Constitution for a book under contract to Simon and Schuster. Her reviews of books on American History have appeared in the New York Times Book Review over the past few decades, and she was a consultant and "talking head" the PBS six-part series " Liberty! The American Revolution," which was originally broadcast in November 1997, and appeared on the 2002 PBS series on "Benjamin Franklin" as well as several programs on the History Channel.

Holly Mayer is an Associate Professor of History at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Mayer is a scholar of early American history with a particular interest in the Revolution. She has written about, and continues to examine, the Continental Army and civil-military relations during the War for American Independence. She is the author of Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (1996) and the co-editor of a reader, For the Record: A Documentary History of America (1999, 2^nd ed. 2003). She is presently working on the story of a Revolutionary soldier’s service and researching the formation of American identity.

Gary Nash is professor of history and director of the National Center for History in the Schools of UCLA. A former president of the Organization of American Historians, he has written and edited more than twenty books. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society. From 1992 to 1996, he co chaired the National History Standards Project, which culminated with the publication of "National History Standards in World and U.S. History." Nash lectures widely and works closely with the National Park Service on a number of projects.

BACK TO TOP