"If the Study of History Teaches Anything, It Teaches Us the Limitations of Life"

"Professor Wood distilled what he found exceptional in the Revolutionary period in 'The Radicalism of the American Revolution.' 'To base a society on the commonplace behavior of ordinary people,' he wrote, 'may be obvious and understandable to us today, but it was momentously radical in the long sweep of world history up to that time.'"

At The New York Times, David Stout, Alex Traub, and Ash Wu write an obituary for Gordon S. Wood.

And David Waldstreicher at The New Republic writes an appreciation.

"One Reason the Revolution Disappoints Is Because We Assume It Ended Too Soon"

"Yet Richards's final plea is still worth heeding: 'a narrative of the American Revolution that only criticizes is a poor replacement for a narrative that only celebrates.' It may simply be that history books are not the best place to look for this 'usable past,' as historians call it. In many ways, ordinary Americans are already doing that work themselves. You see one version in MAGA's appropriation of Revolutionary symbols, from the 'Don't Tread On Me' flag to the movement's Tea Party roots. But the impulse appears on the left as well. Bernie Sanders frequently invokes the Founders in his fight against oligarchy, even casting his first presidential campaign as part of an ongoing 'political revolution' that 'never ends.' Mainstream liberals, too, seem to have caught the Revolutionary spirit: What is the protest slogan 'No Kings,' after all, if not a reminder that the founding still resonates, and might not be as distant as it seems?"

Eric Herschthal at The New Republic reviews Nathan Perl-Rosenthal's The Long Revolution: Creating a United States after 1776 and Thomas Richards, Jr.'s The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended.

"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.'"

"Far From a Tyrant"

"Had British statesmen possessed the diplomatic acumen of Franklin and Washington, Mr. Roberts argues, a way through the impasse in North America might have been found. Many colonists had hoped that George III would take their side against Parliament. The king himself spoke of 'fighting the battle of the legislature.' Instead, the British establishment—the king included—determined to crush what they viewed as a conspiracy of the colonial elite. The result was a conflict that, while not unwinnable, stretched Britain's resources to the limit."

At The Wall Street Journal, William Anthony Hay reviews Andrew Roberts's The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III.

"Making This Promise Real Has Been the Work of Generations"

"The new birth of freedom that Abraham Lincoln extolled in the Gettysburg Address required the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which amounted to a second founding. It was this second founding that made the first founding worthy of being saved. Much like the founders before them, those who ushered in a second founding learned from experience, working to improve an imperfect Constitution.  At Gettysburg, Lincoln cast the nation as 'conceived in liberty' and 'dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal.' Lincoln's effort was to complete the 'unfinished work' of the founding generation. If Lincoln cast this 'unfinished work' as an effort to restore America to its foundations, to a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, this was an effort to return to something real, but that never actually existed—only the promise of it did."

George Thomas at The Bulwark discusses "America's Imperfect Founding."

"It Is Baked into Every Apple Pie, and It Lurks Beneath Purple Mountains' Majesty"

"The line between cooperation and conspiracy, between politicking and plotting, is necessarily subjective. But episodically throughout American history, in every century from the 17th to the 21st, some considerable share of Americans has fallen under the spell of a fantastical, fevered vision of conspiracy, usually with occult and Satanic elements. Most often, these conspiracy theories are politically oriented, but sometimes they pop up outside of politics, as in the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, the Satanic-day-care-abuse panic of the 1990s, and the Satanism panic touching rock music and role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons that immediately preceded that fiasco, echoes of which can still be heard in dark whisperings that the Harry Potter franchise is a Luciferian propaganda project. Richard Hofstadter famously called the associated political tendency 'the paranoid style in American politics,' tracing its history back to the Illuminati panic that gripped the New England clergy in the 18th century. Hofstadter makes an important and often underappreciated point: Conspiracy theories attract lunatics, but their relevance extends far beyond the bughouse."

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review explains "Why Americans Adore Conspiracy Theories."

And Greg Miller at Knowable Magazine writes about "a new type of 'conspiracy without theory' that relies on sheer assertion and repetition rather than evidence and reason."

"Hundreds of Years Later, Those Two Competing Views of Freedom Remain Largely Unreconcilable"

"When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy groups FreedomWorks or the Federalist Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually mean something very different from civil rights activists like John Lewis—and from the revolutionaries, abolitionists and feminists in whose footsteps Lewis walked. Instead, they are channeling 19th century conservatives like Francis Parkman and William Graham Sumner, who believed that freedom is about protecting property rights—if need be, by obstructing democracy."

Annelien de Dijn at Time discusses left and right definitions of freedom.

"Traffic Analysis, in a Different Form"

"Along with Yale University historian Edmund S. Morgan and other contemporaries, he challenged the theory of Charles A. Beard that the founders were wealthy opportunists less interested in ideas than in power, using revolutionary rhetoric to arrange a society that primarily benefited themselves. Through a close reading of political pamphlets, Bailyn believed that the founders held sincere and reasoned ideas about democracy and profoundly objected to British claims of ultimate power to enact laws for the colonies."

Hillel Italie at The Daily Sentinel reports the death of Bernard Bailyn.

Gordon Wood praises Bailyn in a 2015 Weekly Standard article.

As does Daniel N. Gullotta at The Bulwark.

"We Stumbled Into Modernity Accidentally, not by Any Divine Plan"

"The Founding didn't apply these principles as universally as its rhetoric implied. But that rhetoric was transformative. When the Declaration of Independence was written, some dismissed the beginning as flowery boilerplate; what mattered was the ending: Independence! But the boilerplate became a creed, and America's story is the story of that creed—those mere words—unfolding to its logical conclusion. That is what Lincoln did at Gettysburg when he reconceived the meaning of America, what Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to when he called on Americans to live up to their own story's highest principles. A civilization is simply a story: the story the people tell themselves about themselves."

National Review runs an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy.

"But the Main Purpose of Militias—North and South—During This Period Was to Suppress Slave Rebellions"

"Throughout the 17th century, almost all the English colonies along the Eastern Seaboard passed legislation prohibiting women and slaves from owning guns and forbidding the sale of guns to native peoples. By the 18th century, gun ownership had become a defining feature of white masculinity in the English colonies and guns played an integral role in Colonial men's public displays of that masculinity.
"The public training exercises Colonial men participated in as part of their militia service were central to such displays and offered opportunities for them to participate in competitions to demonstrate their martial prowess. In many cases, guns were not only central to these demonstrations but were the prize for victory. The commander of the militia in Henrico County, Va., William Byrd, noted in his diary that he made a practice of awarding pistols to the men who won the competitions that took place on militia days. Such guns thus acted as material manifestations of a Colonial man's physical domination of his peers, augmenting his reputation in terms of property ownership and bodily prowess."

Nathan Wuertenberg at The Washington Post explains the origins of American gun culture.

And Thom Hartmann in a 2013 Truthout article explains how slave patrols ended up in the Second Amendment.

"Has Composed with Our Liberal Values Before and Can Revive Our Politics Again"

"Dating to early Renaissance Florence, its most influential exponent was Niccolò Machiavelli, whom Brooks, channeling Deneen, accuses of leading modern political thinkers to 'reject the classical and religious idea that people are political and relational creatures' and to decide that 'you couldn't base a system of government on something as unreliable as virtue.'
"But the essence of Machiavelli’s political thought is the opposite: He advocated republican government, which depends on citizens motivated precisely by virtue to look beyond their private, self-centered interests. In fact, the premises underlying the republican credo come ultimately from the ancient Aristotelean conception of the human being as a 'political animal,' whose highest interest was realized in participatory self-rule."

Win McCormack at the New Republic challenges the idea that liberalism was "the founding creed of the United States."

Park MacDougald at New York reviews Patrick J. Deenen's Why Liberalism Failed.

And Andrew Sullivan at New York contrasts Deenen's views to those of Stephen Pinker.

"During My Lifetime, the Love of Guns Has Become a Fetish"

"So that's how we got here. The NRA has won. Yet the group and its compatriots seem no less paranoid or angry, still convinced that tyranny is right around the corner and that federal agents are coming for their guns. The wholesale confiscation of guns was never seriously bruited in the United States. Through the 1980s, even most conservatives considered the fear of confiscation to be screwball paranoia, relegated to self-published tracts like  Behold a Pale Horse, which imagined a 'patriot data bank' kept by the government, 'consist[ing] of information collected about American patriots, men and women who are most likely to resist the destruction of our Constitution and the formation of the totalitarian police state under the New World Order.' Now, however, thanks to the NRA, it's the rare Republican leader who doesn't encourage the confiscation fantasy."

Slate runs an excerpt from Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.

Later it adds another excerpt about Oprah Winfrey.

And adds yet another on the history of right-wing conspiracism since the 1960s.

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.

"We Do Not Need to Take Sides in These Battles to Do Justice to Their Histories"

"In books like 'Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s' (1984) and 'Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination' (1992), Dr. Appleby challenged this view.

"She argued that the revolutionaries were more individualistic and optimistic than they had been given credit for. John Locke and Adam Smith had as much influence—or even more—than the radical Whigs on founders like Thomas Jefferson. In her view, the revolutionaries believed that the public good would arise out of the harmonious pursuit of private interests in a market economy."

 

Sewell Chan in The New York Times writes an obituary for historian Joyce Appleby.

And Randy Kennedy reports the death of critic John Berger.

And Robert D. McFadden reports the death of author and journalist Nat Hentoff.

"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.