Reminder: If you’re reading this in your email, you have to go to dpauthor.com and click on the Speaking of Which tab in order to view the actual blog post with the featured image.
The Revolution has been a source of inspiration to many and contention to others. Let me suggest that anyone wanting to explore how its legacy has been interpreted by posterity would do well to read Michael D. Hattem’s new book, The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History (Yale University Press, 2024).
I’d like too share the following excerpt from Hattem’s epilogue (“The Revolution in the New Millennium”):
For nearly two hundred and fifty years, the popular memory of the Revolution has served as the nation’s origin myth. It has provided heroes and stories that have helped generations of Americans create emotional connections to the nation’s founding and often equally emotional definitions of what it means to be an American. The popular memory of the Revolution has been an important vehicle through which Americans have defined and voiced their understanding.of the present and their hopes for the future. Like those of many other older societies, the American origin myth has been consistently contested, as generation after generation has reimagined the Revolution in ways that are most meaningful and useful at the time. As a result, conflicts in American politics and culture over partisanship, regionalism, race, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion have unavoidably shaped and been shaped by the ways in which Americans have remembered and fought over their Revolution. Ultimately, the long history of the popular memory of the Revolution reveals that remembering the nation’s founding has often done far more to divide Americans than it has to unite them. It also reminds us that revising the past is an important and long-standing American political tradition, while this epilogue offers a clear indication that the memory of the Revolution remains a vitally contested part of American life well into the twenty-first century.
As someone once said, history is an argument that never ends. And I think that an essential part of being an American is arguing about what it means to be an American, or—in other words—what the Revolution means today.
This will probably be my last blog post until next year, as I’m working on another article for the Journal of the American Revolution (number 11, but who’s counting?) and expect that to supersede any other literary activity for the time being.
Have a great holiday season, everyone!