Saratoga & The American Revolution: Dr. Kevin Weddle & Dr. Ricardo Herrera

Join author, professor and VFPA board member Dr. Ricardo Herrera for a conversation with his colleague Dr. Kevin J. Weddle, a professor emeritus of military theory and strategy and the former Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies at the US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. He is a native Minnesotan and a graduate of the US Military Academy and served over 28 years on active duty in the US Army before retiring as a colonel.

He holds master’s degrees in history and civil engineering from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. During his Army career he served in a variety of command and staff positions in the United States and overseas to include command of a combat engineer battalion, and he is a veteran of Operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom. At the Army War College, he led the Advanced Strategic Art Program and served as the deputy dean of academics.

He leads military and civilian groups on tours and staff rides of battlefields in the United States and Europe, including Gettysburg, Antietam, Normandy, Sicily, Anzio, Gallipoli, Waterloo, Agincourt, and others. In 2019, he served as the William L. Garwood visiting professor at Princeton University. His first book, Lincoln’s Tragic Admiral: The Life of Samuel Francis Du Pont (University of Virginia Press, 2005), won the 2006 William E. Colby Award. His second book, The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution, was awarded the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and the Society of the Cincinnati Prize.

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He has twice won the US Army War College Excellence in Teaching award and he is a licensed professional civil engineer. Books can be purchased through Reads & Co., the official bookseller of the Valley Forge Speaker Series.

Dr. Ricardo A. Herrera is Visiting Professor, Department of National Security and Strategy, U.S. Army War College and an award-winning historian. He is the author of Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2021), For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861 (New York: New York University Press, 2015), and of several articles and chapters on US military history. Herrera is now completing the tentatively titled book, A Most Uncommon Soldier: The Life, Letters, and Journal of Edward Ashley Bowen Phelps, 1814-1893, an edited collection, to be published by the University Press of Kansas. His next project will examine the 1778 and 1779 campaigns for Savannah.