Some of you exposed your own British Occupation, or perhaps liberation in the perspective of many. Its our third year in a row doing sort of what we call flagship living history event. We place about 70 costumed interpreters out on to the streets of old city philadelphia and imagine what life was like under british rule. One of the big agendas of the event is to present the fall of 1777 in a complicated way to show that for many of the people that remained in the city that winter this was an occupation and maybe a liberation from many of their perspectives and they wrote about in the period being liberated from the tire ran cat you certain asians of a tyrannical congress, which is maybe something we can all aspire to some day. So we do this with living history programming in part because people come to museums to learn in all different ways to encounter the real things of history to have a Human Experience to connect with it and one way we bring it to life is with living history progra
Ii. And professor urwin is a long time friend of this museum project. It is one of the great advantages of being in philadelphia, that we can be close neighbors to professor urwin, whose work on the british army in the American Revolution is extensive, and nuanced, and is always inspiring of our exhibits, and publications, and the development of our core exhibition, professor urwin played a crucial role in the display of the story of enslaved runaways, weighing the promise of the phillipsburg proclamation, announced by general clinton in 1779, which offered somewhat vaguely protection and perhaps freedom of run aways who made their way through to the british lines through consultation with a number of historians, particularly of africanAmerican History in this period, it became a really an imperative that we do two very challenging, often seemingly contradictory things with our tableau in showing people facing this question of whether to trust the british on this promise. And one was t