Buffalo City Historian Lindsey Lauren Visser on Erie County’s America 250 and Seeing the Revolution from Britain

America 250 does not end on July 4th. It stretches across years of anniversaries. Even in a region whose Revolutionary story is thinner than the East Coast’s, there are still plenty of ways to mark the nation’s founding. How do they tell Western New York’s own 250-year story? Click the image below to watch this week’s episode of the State of Greater Western New York Report and discover a side of the Revolutionary War you might not know.

In the first half, host Chris Carosa talks with Lindsey Lauren Visser, City of Buffalo Historian, about how she became a historian—starting as a political-science student at Canisius, accidentally accumulating enough history credits to graduate as a history major, then earning a master’s in modern history at Oxford. From the British side, the American Revolution was a British event until independence was actually won. They discuss how that perspective changes the origin story, the later war-weariness in Britain, the War of 1812 (including the burning of Buffalo after Newark), and the complicated place of the Iroquois Confederacy.

In the second half, Visser describes Erie County’s coordinated commemorations: the Erie County Historical Commission, formed to handle the Erie Canal’s 200th (2025), America 250 (2026), and Freedom 27 (the 200th anniversary of New York’s abolition of slavery). They built a commemoration guide with nine interpretive themes and working groups across the county. Programs already include a Tombstone Trail of Revolutionary War veterans and early founders, the Quilt of Belonging (still collecting squares toward a goal of 250, on display at the Erie County Fair), events at Hull House and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site, and the signature “Stars, Stripes, and Ciders” / Signers Day celebration, postponed by weather from August 2 and now planned as a two-day Labor Day weekend event at Canalside with fireworks.

For more on Erie County’s America 250 events, visit eriecounty250.com. Watch this and other episodes of The State of Greater Western New York Report at https://stateof.greaterwesternnewyork.com/.

Theme music by “mansardian” courtesy of FreeSound.org under Creative Commons License Attribution 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/