Lecture Series

^{Above: Jean Leon Gerome Ferris. Patrick Henry in the First Continental Congress. Painting. Circa 1895. From Library of Congress/Cleveland Museum of Art.}

Each year the Charlotte Chapter hosts a series of lectures to educate our members and the community on important and interesting topics and events at its monthly meetings.

In 2026, the series will focus on the telos of SAR mission statement: “Founding Principles of our Country.”

The series presented by Martin Calkins, Ph.D – an academic business ethicist specializing in moral theology and philosophy – explores the origins and applications of natural rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), equality, and limited government that are embedded in America’s earliest documents and comprise the SAR mission statement’s semantic anchor.

Presentations include:

Patriotism: Rabble Rebels and America’s Glorious Revolution (February 2026)

Explores the nature of patriotism, the actual demographic mix and antipathies of those who fought for the cause of freedom, the tough individual and collective circumstances of extended families and small communities as men went to battle, and the population’s predisposition to revolution because of the 17th–c. British civil wars.

^{Source: Kenneth Roberts. Rabble in Arms. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1933.
Painting: N. C. Wyeth, Benedict Arnold and Men, 1933, oil on canvas, 36 × 36 in. (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College).}

^{Painting: John Cameron, Washington, Crossing the Delaware: On the Evening of Dec. 25th 1776, hand-colored lithograph, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.}

INSPIRATION Part 1: American Revolution as Inspirational (March 2026)

Focuses on how a Germanic painter – Emanuel Leutze – perceived the American Revolution as an opportunity for Central Europeans to adopt new forms of thinking, leadership, and living together. Here the American model expressed in art served as an inspirational ideal or model of hope and compatibility for the widely divergent population of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE).

^{Above: August von Pettenkofen, The Opening Ceremony of the Parliament on 5 July 1848 (after a painting by József Borsos), 1848, colored lithograph, Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, Hungary.}

Inspiration Part 2: American Revolution as Threat (April 2026)

Returns to Germanic painter Emanuel Leutze’s art to show how the American Revolution aggravated tensions within the HRE as it struggled to recover from Ottoman warring expansionism. Here, American ideals complicated the Habsburgs’ problems of managing a larger multi-ethnic empire, the severe financial constraints associated with years of warfare. the ongoing resistance of Hungarians to centralization, and the rise of the “Springtime Revolutions” and Marxism. Focusing on SAR’s “founding principles,” America’s individualism, shifting patriotism, citizen-led nationalism, and positive-sum free market trade are shown to contrast with the communitarianism, central control, zero-sum mercantilism, and imperial-directed globalism and anti Americanism pervasive in the HRE.