CBH Talk | The Untold Story of Brooklyn’s Revolutionary War Prison Ships

As the nation marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, many stories of the American Revolution are being revisited, yet few are as harrowing as the story of the British prison ships anchored in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay. Following the Battle of Brooklyn, thousands of captured American soldiers, sailors, and privateers were confined aboard a fleet of overcrowded prison ships. Disease, starvation, and brutality claimed the lives of an estimated 11,000 prisoners, making these ships one of the deadliest sites of the Revolutionary War.

Join Center for Brooklyn History Chief Historian Dominique Jean-Louis for a conversation with historian Robert P. Watson about his acclaimed book, The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn: An Untold Story of the American Revolution. Drawing on diaries, newspapers, military records, and firsthand accounts, Watson reconstructs the grim world of the infamous HMS Jersey and the experiences of the men who endured its horrors. Together, Jean-Louis and Watson explore this overlooked chapter of Brooklyn's Revolutionary past, the ways memory and commemoration have shaped its legacy, and what the prison ships reveal about the human cost of the fight for independence.
 

This program is presented in conjunction with the Center for Brooklyn History’s current exhibition, The Battle of Brooklyn: Fought and Remembered, which traces how this defining conflict has been commemorated, contested, and reimagined over time.

Participants

Robert Watson has published nearly 50 books and 200 scholarly articles and essays on topics in political, military, and social history, as well as two multi-edition, multi-volume encyclopedia sets on the presidents and first ladies. Some of his recent books include Affairs of State (Bloomsbury, 2012), America’s First Crisis (SUNY Press, 2014), The Nazi Titanic (Hachette, 2016), The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn (Hachette, 2017), George Washington’s Final Battle (Georgetown University Press, 2021), Escape! (Bloomsbury, 2021), When Washington Burned (Georgetown University Press, 2023), American’s First Plague (Bloomsbury, 2023), Rebels at the Gates (Bloomsbury, 2025), Declaration (Bloomsbury, 2026), and the forthcoming books The Trump Presidency (SUNY Press) and Trial! (Bloomsbury). 

A frequent media commentator, Watson has been interviewed thousands of times by news outlets around the world, including CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, The New York Times, NPR, and the BBC, and has appeared on Hardball, The Daily Show, C-SPAN, The Washington Journal, etc. He was a longtime Sunday columnist for the Sun-Sentinel newspaper and has served as researcher, writer, and an on-screen expert for three dozen historical documentaries for such networks as Science, National Geographic, History Channel, Fuse, Super Channel, and others, including two seasons of an international award-winning series on Nazi secrets and two shows on the Civil War hosted by Morgan Freeman.

Dominique Jean-Louis, Ph.D, is the Chief Historian of the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library. Among the exhibitions she has curated are The Battle of Brooklyn: Fought and Remembered, Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery in Brooklyn, and a pop-up exhibition, Memories Matter, in the Euclid Avenue subway station as a collaboration with the MTA's Vacant Unit Activation Program. Previously, she held the position of Associate Curator of History Exhibitions at the New York Historical. She received her Ph.D in US History from New York University, with her doctoral research focusing on race, ethnicity, and immigration in post-Civil Rights Era Brooklyn schools. Dominique regularly writes and lectures on Blackness in America, schools and education, and New York City history.