The Veterans Breakfast Club is all about storytelling—“living history”—but as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we thought we’d reach back to our nation’s founding generation of veterans and see how their stories compared to the ones we hear at our storytelling events. Our spring 2026 issue of VBC Magazine
In late February, the VBC, in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators, held its first annual StoryFest in Santa Monica, California. During this three-day storytelling festival, attendees toured the USS Iowa, immersed themselves in Vietnam narratives through new technology, heard from women veterans who smashed the brass ceiling, watched a theatre performance by a Vietnamese American
By Todd DePastino As a historian drawn to veterans’ stories, I sometimes indulge a private daydream. One morning at a Veterans Breakfast Club gathering, just as the coffee is being poured and the conversations begin, the door opens and in walks a small, weathered old man in a dusty colonial militia uniform. He’s bent
A Black Soldier in the Continental Army Boyrereau Brinch, later known as Jeffrey Brace, was born in West Africa around 1742, kidnapped as a teenager, and carried into Atlantic slavery before being sold repeatedly in the Caribbean and New England. In Connecticut, he eventually came into the household of Mary Stiles, a widow in
James Thatcher “On that sad day how many hearts were wrung!” Army surgeon James Thacher, experienced unexpected heartbreak as he watched the army disband at Newburgh, New York, in 1783. In this passage, he recalls veterans parting in poverty and uncertainty and the formidable Baron von Steuben, the stern Prussian drillmaster of Valley Forge,
By Todd DePastino In 1864, the American Experiment was on the brink of extinction as the Civil War tore the country apart. That same year, a Connecticut minister named Elias Brewster Hillard quietly embarked on a search for last living veterans of the American Revolution. Rev Elias Brewster Hillard, 1825-1895. (Find A Grave
