About the Author

Charlie Rosenberg, the originator of 1776 In Living Color, did most of my growing up in Wisconsin and it seems likely I will live my last few decades here as well. I graduated from Appleton High School West in 1972 (it was cool in my circle of friends to skip the graduation ceremonies), and I now live on the north side of Milwaukee. In between I have lived, worked, and agitated (in the finest sense of the word) in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, California, Oregon, among other places. I began reading on the American Revolutionary War in first grade, found a biography of Toussaint Louverture in Lincoln Elementary School library in second grade, and began studying the Civil War during the centennary observances of 1961-1965. I have no academic position or affiliation. I read, and I know things. I drove a paratransit bus for five years, briefly serving as shop steward for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998. I was probably the only union bus driver simultaneously contributing to reference works from Oxford University Press. The formal term is “Independent Scholar.” Under that designation, I have written for ABC-CLIO’s Encyclopedia of the American Revolutionary War, Ethnic and Racial Minorities in the US Military, Encyclopedia of the US Government and the Environment, and Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations and Rebellions in American History. I contributed a number of entries to the Oxford Encyclopedia of African American History 1896-2008, including what I believe to be the best 4000 word essay on Racism ever written. (I also researched and wrote on Haiti, Socialist Party, People’s Party, Vermont, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Science and Scientists, Engineering and Technology). I make mistakes sometimes. When I wrote the 500 word entry on Vermont, I could find no trace that anyone of African descent was among the original settlers. I have since learned there were at least two. Both served in the Green Mountain Boys, when Fort Ticonderoga was seized from a British garrison. I did know that before the American Revolution, before the New Hampshire Grants (also claimed by the Proprietary Province of New York) were admitted to the union as the state of Vermont, slavery was prohibited by those who first carved out farms there. I have also written for the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, researched over 250 lives for African American National Biography, and prepared several entries, including an overview of the Midwest, for the Encyclopedia of Water Politics, published by CQ Press.

The line of research that led to this web production, as well as to most of my writing for reference works, began in 1999 when I was a full time volunteer at Alderson Hospitality House in West Virginia. Our guests were families visiting at the nearby federal women's prison. First I began collecting information on the federal prison labor system, UNICOR. Then it occurred to me that the first work force to clear forests and establish tobacco plantations in British North America was exported prison labor. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I've been coaching a chess team in the Franklin Heights area of Milwaukee for 12 years, and trying to turn a narrow inner-city lot into a garden – hardly any grass if I can help it. I've also served as a local church historian, and developed an interest in the Wesley brothers, the Great Awakening, the Moravian missions, John Hus, and John Wycliffe. The Great Awakening actually provided an essential foundation for the American Revolution, intertwined with the Enlightenment. The religious revivals of the 1740s to 1770s provided the non-elite masses of the colonies with a sense that they mattered, that they were children of God, that the planters and royal governors weren’t all that, and it swept up people of European, African, and Native American ancestry in a common cause.

I have two grandparents who immigrated from eastern Europe around 1905, four great-great-grandparents who arrived in the 1850s to work in the Pennsylvania coal fields, a great-great-grandfather who served in the 11th Tennessee Cavalry, U.S. Army in the Civil War, some ancestors who were here before the American Revolution, a possible distant cousin who was transported to the penal colony in Australia. My great-great-grandfather Morgan Jenkins, according to his biography, joined the abolitionist movement soon after arriving in the United States. My civil war veteran ancestor’s brothers-in-law tried to kill him – which means they were confederate, and oddly, my only known ancestor who fought in the revolutionary war was their mother’s grandfather. Go figure. History is a lot more diverse than we generally credit, or than most of us really appreciate.