"In All of Its Complexity, Contradictions, and Ingenuity"

"Launching today and just ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary, a special issue of The Atlantic brings together a remarkable group of scholars, essayists, and reporters to revisit America's founding era, measuring the success of the American experiment, two and a half centuries later, against the lofty dreams and designs of the founding generation. In an editor's note, The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes of the issue, 'You will see that we are not simplistic, jingoistic, or uncritical in our approach, but we are indeed motivated by the idea that the American Revolution represents one of the most important events in the history of the planet, and its ideals continue to symbolize hope and freedom for humankind.' He continues, 'We are publishing this at the end of 2025 for a number of reasons: This month marks the launch of an Atlantic project meant to explain the meaning of the Revolution and its consequences, which we will carry through all of next year… We also recognize that the American experiment is under extraordinary pressure at the moment, and we think it important to do anything we can to illuminate the challenges we face.'"

The Atlantic unveils "The Unfinished Revolution."

"Can We Still Hear the 'Shot Heard Round the World'?"

"Within minutes, the British commander, Major John Pitcairn had reasserted control over his forces and ordered them to resume their march to Concord, where they destroyed three large cannon and threw 500 pounds of musket balls into a local pond. A handful of militia companies, totaling a few hundred men, advanced on the British troops and, after being fired upon, fired back at the redcoats—who then beat a retreat. But word of the troops' movements had spread through the countryside and armed locals took up positions behind fences, walls, and trees flanking the return route to Boston along Old Concord Road. As the British soldiers began the lengthy march back to their base, they were met with gunfire from invisible enemies hiding in the forest. The march turned into a mad dash to safety. The war for American independence had begun, even if independence would not be declared for another fifteen months."

Lindsay M. Chervinsky at The Bulwark marks the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

"Not the Freedom to Do Anything You Damn Well Pleased"

"'It's a very malleable phrase,' said Patrick Henry Jolly, a fifth great grandson of Henry. 'It's something that can be applied to many different circumstances. But I think it's important that people understand the original context.'"

Ben Finley at the Associated Press notes the semiquincentennial of Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death!" speech.

"They Indeed Are Replaying the Shadow Side of the Revolution in Their Adherence to Conspiratorial, Violent, and Racist Views That Stemmed From Their Fear of Losing Power"

"Most liberals and many conservatives would recoil at the notion that the people who rampaged through the Capitol Building, injuring police officers and threatening to lynch the vice president and speaker of the House, deserve the label of patriot. Yet as we approach the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding, a candid consideration of some of the darker aspects our history, too often overlooked, supports the claims by rioters that they were following in many of our Founders' footsteps, as are millions of Trump supporters today—just not in the way they think."

Andrew Lawler at The Bulwark explains how January 6 insurrectionists connect to 1776.

"Made It Express 'Timeless, Universally Binding Norms'"

"Once the Declaration had been issued, perceptions began to change. Black Americans were among the first to change them, notably the New England-based clergyman Lemuel Haynes. Soon after July 4, Haynes wrote 'Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping,' an essay not published until 1983 but seen as reflecting the feelings of many in the Black community, with its call to 'affirm, that Even an affrican, has Equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen.'"

Hillel Itelie at Associated Press discusses "[t]he long, ongoing debate over 'All men are created equal.'"

"That One Sentence About the Role of Slavery in the Founding of the United States Has Ended Up at the Center of a Debate Over the Whole Project"

"Both sets of inaccuracies worried me, but the Revolutionary War statement made me especially anxious. Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that's exactly what has happened."

Leslie M. Harris at Politico discusses her interaction with The New York Times and its 1619 Project.

Dead on the Fourth of July

"The importance of July 4 might have surprised some Founding Fathers. The Continental Congress declared freedom from Britain on July 2 and approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Most members signed the document in August.
"Adams thought Americans would remember July 2 as their 'Day of Deliverance' from Britain. In a letter to his wife, Abigail, he wrote, 'It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

Melissa Etehad in the Los Angeles Times discusses the deaths of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe.

"We Could Have Been Canada"

"Had the British won, we might now be taught about a fight between brave British emancipators and indigenous slaveholders, with the black slaves who defected to the British-loyalist side seen as self-emancipators, as the blacks who defected to the Union Army are now, and with Washington's and Jefferson's rhetoric of liberty shown the same disdain we have for the not-very-different libertarian and individualist rhetoric of their heirs in the Confederacy. We would perhaps wonder, far more than we are now allowed to, how radical Whigs like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine ever allowed themselves to betray their own Enlightenment principles by making the tragic error of entering into a compact with slaveholders."

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker looks at recent books on the American Revolution.

"Truly Our First 'Civil War'"

"Taylor's not interested in a triumphalist account of the nation's origins; instead, his core arguments deliberately overturn the notion that the Revolution was fought for egalitarian, democratic principles. Most colonists, Taylor highlights, felt deeply attached to the British monarchy on the eve of the Revolution. There was no distinct American identity to speak of, and everywhere Britain's American colonists looked—north to French Canada, south to Spanish America—they saw settlers with virtually no political autonomy. Their king, meanwhile, granted them greater civil liberties than any other European ruler; for much of the 18^th century, British monarchs allowed elected Colonial assemblies to run their own affairs. But rather than inculcating a sense of independence, these Colonial assemblies only made American colonists cherish more deeply their status as 'free-born Englishmen.'
"So why, then, a war for independence?"

Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Alan Taylor's American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804.

"American Slavery Could No Longer Be Hidden From the Rest of the World"

"This was a rhetorical device, however, used to set up the glaring contrast between what the founders did for themselves and the condition of black people at that time. In 1776, he noted, many people viewed George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the others as dangerous subversives and insurgent upstarts despite British tyranny.
"However, with the hindsight of 1852, he said, it was no longer problematic to see 'that America was right, and England wrong.'
"Likewise, Douglass noted, in 1852, abolitionism was considered a dangerous and subversive political proposition. The implication here was that future generations would consider his anti-slavery stance patriotic, just, reasonable—and necessary."

Herbert Dyer, Jr., in Counterpunch discusses Frederick Douglass's "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro."

Christopher Wilson in Smithsonian investigates "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the life of Francis Scott Key.

And Robert G. Parkinson in The New York Times looks at slavery, Native Americans, and the Declaration of Independence.

James Livingston reponds to Parkinson at Politics and Letters.

"It's Part of Our National Mythology That Does Not Serve Us Well"

"By belittling the enemy, we diminish the magnitude of our American achievement. While well intended, this 'History Channel' fairytale about Cornwallis, the other British generals, the troops they led, and the conduct of the war is counterproductive. It is an instance of American exceptionalism—we are always better, smarter, and more courageous than the 'JV teams' we face—that we should guard against, not encourage. It makes us vain and smug, and therefore tempting prey for the ruthless SOBs of the world who are amused by our assumptions of unassailable virtue and sparkling intelligence and would take advantage."

Allen Pell Crawford in The American Conservative reviews Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy's The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire and Matthew H. Spring's With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Campaign in North America, 1775–1783.

"The Deep, Founding Roots of Rowdy, American Populist Protest and Insurrection"

"Like it or not, though, it is Occupy Wall Street that has the most in common, ideologically, not with those Boston merchants and their supporters but with the less well-known, less comfortably acknowledged people who, throughout the founding period, cogently proposed and vigorously agitated for an entirely different approach to finance and monetary policy than that carried forward by the famous founders. Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc. (More on that here [9] and here [10].) They were legally barred from voting and holding office, since they didn’t have enough property, so they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies."

William Hogeland in Salon compares Occupy Wall Street with the Shays' and Whiskey Rebellions.

But Lee Fang at Think Progress connects the protests to the Boston Tea Party.

"A Tale of Greed, Legal Chaos, and Corrupt Business Practices"

"Just how these contests over land play into the Revolution is one of the most debated questions in American history. In 1909, historian Carl Becker argued that the American Revolution was not so much about home rule as 'who should rule at home.' The struggle for independence, in other words, centered less on exalted principles than on the quest for political and economic power by provincial elites. Popular among muckraking classes during the age of Robber Barons, this interpretation was hard to reconcile with a patriotic account of the nation's founding and eventually fell out of favor.
"So Randall is stuck between a rock and a hard place, interpretatively speaking. He wants to connect the Vermont insurrection to 'a greater cause,' to make it the first battle of the American Revolution. And perhaps it was. But if so, does it turn Allen and his Green Mountain Boys into patriots, as Randall would have it? Or does it turn the leaders of the Revolution into bandits, seizing an entire continent for personal gain and dressing the crime up with pretty words?"

François Furstenberg in Slate reviews Willard Sterne Randall's Ethan Allen: His Life and Times.

This Inhuman Piece of Barbarity

"The chaos of the event produced incomplete, even sometimes conflicting, accounts, but it appears that probably no fewer than three soldiers shot at specific individuals: Kilroy, the soldier who killed Attucks, and the soldier who aimed at but missed the fleeing boy. It is reasonable to suppose that two more—the other two soldiers who shot sailors—also shot people intentionally.
"Except for Kilroy, the evidence was not sufficient to convict any of the soldiers of murdering a particular person. John Adams, one of the soldiers’ lawyers, rightly argued that it was better 'that many guilty persons should escape unpunished than one innocent person should suffer.' But there is a lingering sense that justice wasn’t served. Perhaps it couldn’t have been."

Richard Archer in The Boston Globe calls into question conventional accounts of the Boston Massacre.

When That New Party Army Came Marching Right Up the Stairs

"President Obama, speaking at Cairo University last month, described his 'unyielding' belief that various rights espoused by the founders, including free speech, representative government, and respect for property, deserve global support because they are 'not just American ideas.' In fact, they never were."

Adam Freedman in The New York Times connects the Declaration of Independence to English legal traditions.