My first or second year at Messiah College, the student history club produced t-shirts with Ben Franklin’s famous “Join or Die” snake image (see above) on the front. It was partly an attempt to raise the club’s membership. Messiah is […]
American Revolution
Museums will play a key role as the United States heads toward its semiquincentennial in 2026
Here is John Garrison Marks at the blog of the American Alliance of Museums: While the US Semiquincentennial Commission outlined a broad vision for the commemoration in its 2019 Inspiring the American Spirit report—describing a grassroots commemoration that educates, engages, and unites […]
Can the “spirit of 1776 survive the history wars of 2021?”
America’s 250th anniversary is coming. It should be interesting. Here is Jennifer Schuessler at The New York Times: The story historians tell about the American Revolution has changed enormously since the Bicentennial. Uplifting biographies of the founding fathers may still […]
Six things you may not know about the Declaration of Independence
Historian Woody Holton explains at The Conversation: Ordinary Americans played a big role. American independence is due in part to African Americans. The complaints weren’t actually about the King. The Declaration of Independence does not actually denounce monarch. The Declaration […]
Megachurch pastor Greg Laurie keeps pushing the links between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution
Last week at the Sons of American Revolution conference on religion and the American Revolution, I started my keynote lecture this way: On April 5, 2020, Donald Trump announced (via Twitter of course) that he would be streaming the Palm […]
Are we in the midst of a third American revolution?
CNN legal scholar Carrie Cordero and historian Ed Larson at USA Today: We are all familiar with the first American Revolution: an actual war, a rebellion for self-governance. But it was not long after that Thomas Jefferson called the election of 1800 […]
Robert Middlekauff, RIP
Middlekauff is best known as the author of The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789. It was the first book to appear in the Oxford History of the United States series, which also includes James McPherson’s Battle Cry for Freedom: […]
The Author’s Corner with Steven Elliott
Steven Elliott is Part-time Lecturer of History at Rutgers University-Newark. This interview is based on his new book, Surviving the Winters: Housing Washington’s Army during the American Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021). JF: What led you to write Surviving […]
Did the Army Corps of Engineers just find a cannon from the HMS Rose?
In The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America I wrote about Philip Vickers Fithian’s response to cannon fire from the British warship HMS Rose: On July 11 [1776] Philip passed through […]
World Socialist Web Site publishes its critique of the 1619 Project
Learn more about David North and Thomas Mackaman’s edited collection, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. The book includes essays or interviews with Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Adolph Reed Jr., […]
CPAC 2021 is over. Let’s check-in with the MAGA evangelicals
On Saturday night I published a post on the Trump evangelical response to the former president’s speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. You can read it here. Let’s check-in on them today: The Liberty University Falkirk Center crowd […]
The CPAC vocabulary. Defining terms.
I am teaching the American Revolution this semester. The other day, as we were reading and interpreting some primary documents, I asked the students to notice how the writers of these documents all seemed to use a similar political language. […]
Liberty University’s Falkirk Center is promoting an embarrassingly bad Eric Metaxas speech on the American Revolution
I was going to include this in my MAGA evangelicals post this morning, but I decided to save it for a separate post. The Falkirk Center at Liberty University just tweeted a video of an Eric Metaxas speech: Almost everything […]
Was there ever a “black-robed regiment”?
Recently evangelical writer and radio host Eric Metaxas interviewed Rev. Bill Cook, the “CEO” of the Virginia branch of the “black-robe regiment.” Watch: Some comments: There was no such thing as the “black robe regiment” in revolutionary America. Historian and […]
What should we make of Trump’s 1776 Commission Report? Part 2
Read the entire series here. As I type, I am learning that Joe Biden will rescind the 1776 commission today. But I will go ahead with my analysis since I imagine that states with conservative governors or legislators may try […]
“The Culture of the Confederation Era”
The Panorama, the online site of The Journal of the Early Republic, is running an informative roundtable on the United States under the Articles of Confederation. Here is a taste of Rosemarie Zagarri‘s introduction to the roundtable: In March 2020, […]
Episode 74: An Independent Woman in Revolutionary America
In this episode we talk with historian Lorri Glover about Eliza Lucas Pinckney, a woman who lived through the American Revolution in South Carolina. Pinckney’s story sheds light on gender, agriculture, politics, and slavery in this era and unsettles many […]
The Author’s Corner with Donald Johnson
Donald Johnson is Assistant Professor of History at North Dakota State University. This interview is based on his new book, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). JF: What led you to […]
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Context
A short history of the 1619 Project
Over at The Washington Post, Sarah Ellison chronicles the ways The New York Times‘s 1619 Project has influenced American politics in 2020. Here is a taste: Sean Wilentz remembers the Sunday morning in August when he walked down his driveway to […]