About the Timeline of the American Revolution
The Timeline of the American Revolution was made possible in part by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Additional support provided by VisitPA.com, the Achelis & Bodman Foundation, and the Gordon and Llura Gund Foundation.
The Museum of the American Revolution works to uncover and share compelling stories about the diverse people and complex events that sparked America’s ongoing experiment in liberty, equality, and self-government. Many of these stories are explored in the Museum’s core galleries, through immersive environments, life-like tableaux, object displays, and short films. But the Museum began telling some of these stories before there was a physical building in which to tell them.
The multimedia Timeline of the American Revolution was created as an app in 2009, almost a decade before the Museum opened its doors to the public. Using high-quality images of objects, artifacts, and documents from the Museum’s collection, and enriched with videos of featured materials, the Timeline introduced the Museum to the public and made real for the first time our commitment to telling rich and important stories of the people, ideas, and events of the American Revolution. In the intervening years, technology has evolved, and the Museum’s collection has grown. The Timeline of the American Revolution you now see reflects these shifts.
The new Timeline of the American Revolution uses a combination of contextualizing dates and almost 100 artifacts, artworks, and documents to explore the story of the American Revolution from the end of the French and Indian War through the opening of the Museum of the American Revolution in 2017. The Timeline can be explored at multiple levels: by scrolling through chronologically on the main timeline, by selecting an object to be taken to more detailed information about it and then scrolling through each object detail page, or by selecting a specific theme or searching a specific keyword and exploring the narrowed list of items that result. You can even create and download your own curated list of objects from the Timeline using the My Timeline feature. High-quality, zoomable images along with videos highlighting key features and stories of selected items allow for even deeper dives. When further information is available elsewhere on the Museum website, links are made available.
The Museum’s Timeline of the American Revolution is available to download to your computer or smart device as an offline version. While the offline version does not have all of the features that the online version has, we built this version for users who may have inconsistent wifi and for teachers who would like to download the Timeline to their students’ devices.
To learn how to download the offline version of the timeline, go to https://www.amrevmuseum.org/the-timeline-of-the-american-revolution-offline-app and follow the instructions for your specific supported browser.
Timeline of the American Revolution Creative and Technical Teams
The first iteration of the Timeline of the American Revolution was created by Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, now President and CEO of the Museum. It was originally brought to life, both as an app and as an interactive on the Museum website, by Bluecadet — thank you for seeing the potential. Thank you also to Foster Made for helping us to reshape and relaunch this Timeline when changing technology created both the need and the opportunity.
Many thanks, as well, to the internal project team who worked together to revise and enlarge the Timeline for relaunch in 2022, including Kathryn Babbs-Miller, Linda Dean, Michael Hensinger, Doug Levering, Becky Phipps, Philip Mead, Aimee Newell, Trish Norman, Kevin Rossi, Matthew Skic, Jonathan Stiles, Brandon Straus, Mark Turdo, Abby Vona, and Adrienne Whaley.
The work of the multimedia Timeline of the American Revolution intersects with other Museum projects, including the Washington’s War Tents online resources, the Patriots of Color Archive, and the When Women Lost the Vote virtual exhibit. We are grateful to the work of the many scholars, staff, and other professionals whose contributions resulted in these exciting resources.
Timeline of the American Revolution Teacher Advisors
We are grateful to our National Teacher Advisory Group for their feedback on our digital projects, which has been essential to shaping our work on the relaunched Timeline. In particular, we appreciate their input at key early moments in the functional design of this iteration. We look forward to their ongoing feedback and that of our larger national teacher network as we pilot this relaunched resource in the 2022-2023 school year.
The Timeline of the American Revolution was made possible in part by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
With additional support provided by:
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
The Achelis & Bodman Foundation
The Gordon and Llura Gund Foundation
