“Our tour was about the American Revolution”

Nick DeLuca’s article “When Is History Advocacy?” at the Contingent Magazine site begins like this:

“Excuse me,” a visitor asked as they tapped my shoulder. I was leading a tour group for the National Parks of Boston. We were standing inside Faneuil Hall and just about to hit the Freedom Trail.

Faneuil Hall was the social, political, and commercial heart of colonial Boston. It also was an arena for action and resistance before, during, and after the American Revolution. The visitor inquired, “Is this one of those woke tours?”

I paused. I thought he was joking at first but he waited for a response. “What do you mean?” I replied.

He asked if the tour was “political.” I told him that our tour was about the American Revolution in Boston, so yes.

DeLuca is a longtime seasonal ranger at Boston National Historical Park.

He’s also a longtime student of the political background of the National Park Service, as he discussed years back in this History News Network article.

It’s of course impossible to discuss history without touching on politics, especially at a site that was created for a political purpose and preserved because of political activity. And even if, say, Abolitionism is no longer controversial, its principles and arguments echo in today’s issues.

Furthermore, because the National Park Service is a government entity, it’s inescapably political. The fact that the overwhelming majority of American citizens approve of the agency doesn’t change how it was created through a political process and answers to politicians.

National Parks employees understand the responsibilities that go along with their jobs. They’re very careful to avoid political advocacy—far more so than the politicians above them or than we the people have to. But that can’t mean misrepresenting history or science.

DeLuca’s story of meeting this anti-“woke” visitor ends happily because he did his job. Unfortunately, the current administration has been moving to cut lots of jobs from the National Park Service, and perhaps cut parks as well, in order to reduce taxes on rich people and leave a mark on history. 

Reviewing the Constitution with Ray Raphael

My friend and fellow author Ray Raphael has launched a YouTube channel called “Our Constitution—If We Can Keep It.”

There are six episodes up so far, ranging in length from four to nine minutes. They cover some of the Constitution’s bigger changes from the U.S. of A.’s previous form of government, such as the choice to create a new framework at all and the establishment of the Presidency.

Ray went into much greater detail on these topics in his books Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive, Constitutional Myths, and The U.S. Constitution—Explained, Clause by Clause, for Every American Today, plus lesson plans for the Constitutional Sources Project.

A teacher for many years, Ray is aiming to serve an audience of students and the casually curious with these videos. They clarify the Constitution’s eighteenth-century legal language as in, for example, the episode on “Presidential Powers…and Responsibilities,”

There will be no emoluments. That’s any kind of payment for favors granted. Gifts of any kind have to be disclosed. Congress can either approve them or not, but there will be no under-the-table profiteering. This restraint applies to all federal officials, but the President is singled out for special attention.

Obviously, much about the Constitution was controversial, then and now, and these early episodes brush lightly against the fundamental controversies without getting into the weeds. But if they find an audience, there’s plenty of potential for deeper discussion.

Four more episodes are mapped out for this first “season,” with another eleven after that to cover the Amendments.

“Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration; it is to understand”

The American Historical Association has once again responded to a dubious and harmful White House executive order with a statement on behalf of its members and other historical organizations.

The A.H.A. message is:

The Executive Order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” issued on March 27 by the White House, egregiously misrepresents the work of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian is among the premier research institutions in the world, widely known for the integrity of its scholarship, which is careful and based on historical and scientific evidence. The Institution ardently pursues the purpose for which it was established more than 175 years ago: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” The accusation in the White House fact sheet accompanying the executive order claims that Smithsonian museums are displaying “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology.” This is simply untrue; it misrepresents the work of those museums and the public’s engagement with their collections and exhibits. It also completely misconstrues the nature of historical work.

Historians explore the past to understand how our nation has evolved. We draw on a wide range of sources, which helps us to understand history from different angles of vision. Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration; it is to understand—to increase our knowledge of—the past in ways that can help Americans to shape the future.

The stories that have shaped our past include not only elements that make us proud but also aspects that make us acutely aware of tragedies in our nation’s history. No person, no nation, is perfect, and we should all—as individuals and as nations—learn from our imperfections.

The Smithsonian’s museums collect and preserve the past of all Americans and encompass the entirety of our nation’s history. Visitors explore exhibitions and collections in which they can find themselves, their families, their communities, and their nation represented. They encounter both our achievements and the painful moments of our rich and complicated past.

Patriotic history celebrates our nation’s many great achievements. It also helps us grapple with the less grand and more painful parts of our history. Both are part of a shared past that is fundamentally American. We learn from the past to inform how we can best shape our future. By providing a history with the integrity necessary to enable all Americans to be all they can possibly be, the Smithsonian is fulfilling its duty to all of us.

At the Bulwark, Grand View University history professor Thomas Lecacque also wrote in response:

Trump is mad about the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” because it “claims that ‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’ and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’” This is about as honest as the Trump administration has ever been. “Museums in our Nation’s capital,” the order preaches, “should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” Apparently, that shared reality is centered on the idea that race is a biological fact. This is not true historically or scientifically or in any other way outside the miserable, backwards swamp logic of white supremacy. . . .

The risk is not that Americans will be misled on particular matters of fact, but that they’ll lose their respect for the idea of the truth—will capitulate to the cynical lies. This, in turn, engenders a cultural atmosphere that is inhospitable to dreams and ideals and hopes. It would be to give up our birthright of earnest optimism and our sense that we can always improve our lot and that of the world.

In the Guardian, Wellesley College professor Kellie Carter Jackson wrote:

Trump’s executive order is not about restoring the truth. Quite the opposite. It creates false narratives and myths that promote the supremacy of whiteness. This executive order has the potential for harm because erasure is violence; it robs the public of the truth. Because there is no way to explain slavery and segregation as not “inherently harmful and oppressive”, Trump would rather not explain it at all. . . .

It was impossible to separate the story of Black military service and valor from racial discrimination and violence. Similarly, one cannot separate out the “good” from the “bad” in creating an honest narrative about the United States. Accordingly, the [National Museum of African American History and Culture] holds a special place in America, one where the complexity of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are recognized as founding fathers and slaveholders. There is no abolitionist movement without slavery. There is no suffrage movement without women’s denial. There is no civil rights movement without racism and oppression. These are the facts. Museums exist to collect, preserve and exhibit the past as it happened. Archivists and curators care deeply about their mission to be accurate and authentic.

And author David M. Perry in Foreign Policy:

…the United States has already entered a multiyear cycle commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, but it’s about to intensify as the calendar turns to April, taking the country from celebrations of Paul Revere’s ride (April 18-19, 1775) to the signing of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). The executive orders targeting the Smithsonian strongly suggest that the Trump administration will bleach the story of American history in a way that tries to claim legitimacy for our current post-constitutional order.

The ritual anniversary moments intensify national mythmaking, moving the story to the formation of the nation, with the new authoritarians controlling any and all official narratives in ways that emphasize not the rebellion against a British king, but a submission to the new American one. As historical claims go, trying to make Trump into the culmination of the American Revolutionary War is no more intellectually serious than those executive orders, but mythmaking doesn’t have to be true to be effective.

As historians, as Americans, as teachers and students, we’re going to need to engage these false narratives not just with fact-checking, but with better, truer storytelling of our own. And we don’t need to make myths to claim patriotism for our side. Looking clearly at the past—whether recognizing the truth about the local historical concentration camp or the much bigger story about the long struggle to put ideals about multiracial democracy into true practice—is patriotic.

Believing in “No More Kings”

In September 1975, as America was celebrating its Bicentennial, ABC launched a new season of Schoolhouse Rock interstitials titled “America Rock.”

The first of those ten cartoons was “No More Kings,” featuring a song by Lynn Ahrens that moved rapidly from the Pilgrims at Plymouth to American independence.

It made enough of an impact that a 1990s pop band called itself No More Kings.

The last cartoon in that series, also with a Lynn Ahrens song, was “Three-Ring Government,” about the division between legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

Looking back, historians’ big criticism of “America Rock” was how it presented a simple narrative of constant progress, elevating the perspective of propertied white men and largely ignoring Americans who dissented or lost out.

Seeking to avoid criticism, the producers had avoided current controversies and also tamed the controversies of the past. They reflected a version of national history that the overwhelming majority of Americans in that era could agree on.

Such as “No More Kings” and “Three-Ring Government.”

“The narrator of our most powerful stories, told authentically”

This is an extract of a statement from Jonathan B. Jarvis, director of the National Park Service from October 2009 to January 2017:

The NPS is the steward of America’s most important places and the narrator of our most powerful stories, told authentically, accurately, and built upon scientific and scholarly research. The Park Ranger is a trusted interpreter of our complex natural and cultural history and a voice that cannot be suppressed.

Edicts from on-high have directed the NPS to not talk about “national policy”, but permission is granted to use social media for visitor center hours and safety. The ridiculousness of such a directive was immediately resisted and I am not the least bit surprised.

So at Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta should we not talk about his actions to secure the rights to vote for African Americans in the south, or is that too “national policy”? At Stonewall National Monument in New York City, shall we only talk about the hours you can visit the Inn or is it “national policy” to interpret the events there in 1969 that gave rise to the LGBT movement?

Shall we only talk about the historic architecture of the Washington, DC home of Alice Paul and Alva Belmont or is it too “national policy” to suggest their decades of effort to secure the rights of women can be linked directly to the women’s marches in hundreds of cities last weekend? And as we scientifically monitor the rapid decline of glaciers in Glacier National Park, a clear and troubling indicator of a warming planet, shall we refrain from telling this story to the public because the administration views climate change as “national policy”?

These are not “policy” issues, they are facts about our nation, it is how we learn and strive to achieve the ideals of our founding documents. To talk about these facts is core to the mission of the NPS. During the Centennial of the National Park Service, we hosted over 300 million visitors (now that is huge) to the National Parks and most came away inspired, patriotic and ready to speak on behalf of the values we hold most dear. The new Administration would be wise to figure out how to support the National Park Service, its extraordinary employees and their millions of fans.

As I noted before, the new administration’s hiring freeze meant offers for N.P.S. seasonal jobs were yanked back from successful applicants and new hires are on hold. Since the agency saves money by hiring lots of people only for its busy seasons, and since the federal employment process has a lot of steps to protect the public interest, that freeze is harming normal operations. And around here, many historical parks were planning more than normal operations to commemorate and interpret the Sestercentennial of the start of the Revolutionary War.

In addition, Politico reports, “The Trump administration ordered NPS to report all of its employees currently within a standard one-year probationary period, as well as those hired with money from the Inflation Reduction Act and those employed in programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. Interior last week gave itself 30 days to end those programs, and Trump has ordered a layoff of people working in those programs across the federal government.” As in other policy areas, this administration is taking a position in favor of homogeneity, inequity, exclusion, and inaccessibility.

The first Trump administration never appointed a permanent director for the N.P.S., producing the longest stretch the agency ever went without steady leadership. It repeatedly proposed large cuts to the N.P.S. budget. I don’t believe the recurrent administration is acting for the benefit of the agency or the American people as a whole.

Telling the Truth about Teaching History

Earlier this week, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians released a joint statement joined by dozens of other historical and educational organizations.

Here’s an extract:

The presidential executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling,” signed on January 29, 2025, grossly mischaracterizes history education across the United States, alleging educational malpractice—teachers supposedly “[i]mprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children.” The order uses this caricature to justify sweeping and unprecedented federal interventions in public education.

This inflammatory rhetoric is not new. For the past four years, the same largely fabricated accusations have provided justification for efforts by some state legislatures to prohibit “divisive concepts” in history and social studies education, along with other extreme restrictions that the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and American Historical Association (AHA) have separately and jointly opposed.

Taken together, this state legislation and executive order not only disregard the training, ethics, and lifelong work of history teachers; they also demean American students by assuming that patriotism can be ignited only by triumphal stories and that our students are incapable of forming complex opinions about their nation’s past. . . .

The executive order’s narrow conception of patriotism and patriotic education does more than deny the actual history of American democracy; it also undermines its own goals of a rigorous education and merit-based society.

This is neither history nor patriotism. An uncomplicated celebration of American greatness flattens the past into a parade of platitudes devoid of the context, conflict, contingency, and change over time that are central to historical thinking. We instead support our nation’s educators as they help students learn how past generations fought to make the United States a “more perfect union,” in the words of our Constitution. As they teach the history of how people in the past chose to devote, risk, and in some cases even lose their lives challenging our nation’s most glaring imperfections, they teach our youth resilience, courage, and pride. They also teach them history.

We reject the premise that it is “anti-American” or “subversive” to learn the full history of the United States with its rich and dramatic contradictions, challenges, and conflicts alongside its achievements, innovations, and opportunities. History education that is rooted in professional expertise and integrity can inspire patriotism in American students through deep and honest engagement with our nation’s past and prepare them for informed civic engagement. Teachers want students to grapple with complex history.

This history includes the rich legacy of freedom and democracy built into the nation’s foundation. It also includes legacies of contradictions to those principles present at the nation’s founding and beyond. It includes the struggles of Americans across nearly 250 years to enlarge that legacy—to end slavery, to end prejudice against immigrants from across the world, to end poverty, to build a nation where everyone has the freedom to pursue their dreams.

You can read the entire statement here.

Join Us for “The Outbreak of War,” 3–6 Apr.

Last spring I worked with the Pursuit of History, the nonprofit founded by Lee Wright to organize History Camp, to produce a weekend of talks and tours about the New England rebellion of 1774.

This spring we’re offering a new program. On 3–6 April, we’ll gather in Concord and visit nearby towns to explore “The Outbreak of War.”

Once again, there are a limited number of seats available for this event, and I understand most have already been reserved. People are coming from as far away as California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

The event will start with dinner on Thursday, 3 April, at the eighteenth-century Wayside Inn in Sudbury. Over dessert I’ll review what led up to April 1775 and look ahead to the next three days.

On Friday, 4 April, we’ll meet inside the Wright Tavern in the center of Concord. Massachusetts Provincial Congress delegates met in committee in this building in the spring of 1775, and on April 19 the British commanders used it as their headquarters. We’ll hear presentations from these experts:

• Jayne Triber, Ph.D., author of A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere.
• Don N. Hagist, author of Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution and editor of The Journal of the American Revolution.
• Alexander Cain, author of We Stood Our Ground: Lexington in the First Year of the American Revolution.
• Joel Bohy, expert in historic arms who appears regularly on Antiques Roadshow, sharing findings from recent battlefield archeology.

On that day we’ll also visit Concord’s Old Hill Burying Ground and North Bridge.

That evening, we’ll have dinner at the Colonial Inn, which dates to 1716. I’ll speak afterwards about how the royal government and the Massachusetts Patriots competed to control information before and after the battle.

On Saturday, 5 April, we’ll visit Lexington Common, viewing the historic buildings and monuments nearby and watching the rehearsal for the 250th-anniversary reenactment of the first shots of the Revolutionary War. (We have a contingency plan if bad weather postpones that rehearsal.) We’ll also stop at the Hartwell Tavern site, the Parker’s Revenge site, and the Jason Russell House in Arlington.

On Sunday, 6 April, attendees can sign up for an optional tour of colonial Marblehead architecture with Judy Anderson for an additional cost.

Some meals are included, and some will be up to the attendees. Lodging isn’t included in the cost, but there are rooms available for reserving at the Colonial Inn and other hotel possibilities nearby.

The Pursuit of History has a webpage with lots more details about the event. That page also includes a couple of videos of me out in Concord on a winter day, looking ahead to spring.

Gabrielson on 18th-Century Media Literacy in Newton, 16 Jan.

On Thursday, 16 January, Historic Newton and the Newton Free Library will present Michele Gabrielson speaking on “18th-Century Media Literacy and Bias.”

The event description says:

Media and information literacy are essential 21st-century skills in order to be an informed citizen. These are also skills that, when applied in a historical context, help us become better historians. In this discussion, we will analyze perspective, language and bias in 18th-century newspapers with a critical lens to learn how news was consumed in Colonial America.

Michele Gabrielson is a local history teacher and historic interpreter of the 18th century. The Massachusetts History Alliance gave her its 2024 Rising Star Award for Public History her programming titled “The Revolutionary Classroom,” and the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati just honored her with its 2025 Frederick Graham Award for Excellence in Teaching.

When she is not teaching in the classroom, Gabrielson offers talks, tours, and demonstrations at historic sites around Boston. She specializes in interpreting the stories of women printers, Loyalist refugees, and chocolate makers. Most recently, Gabrielson has started building a detailed first-person impression of playwright, poet, and historian Mercy Warren.

Gabrielson is a member of the Authenticity Standards Committee for Minute Man National Historic Park and the coordinator of Battle Road Guides for the annual reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside her at reenactments of the Boston Tea Party and Boston Massacre as well as last September’s “Powder Alarm” commemoration.

This free event is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. in the library’s Druker Auditorium.

The Many Books of James Kirby Martin

This week brought the news that James Kirby Martin has died at the age of eighty-one.

Earning his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, which used to have a huge American history department, Martin taught at Rutgers before moving to the University of Houston.

In 2018, more than thirty years later, he retired as the Hugh Roy and Lilli Cranz Cullen University Professor of History. He’d held visiting appointments along the way, of course.

When I started researching the actual war part of the Revolution, I knew I was going to use James Kirby Martin’s books. His biography Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered is an excellent scholarly dig into well-trodden ground, and his edition of Joseph Plumb Martin’s memoir, titled Ordinary Courage, is probably the best.

Martin and Mark Edward Lender wrote A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789, as well as Drinking in America: A History, 1620-1980, and they edited Citizen Soldier: The Revolutionary War Journal of Joseph Bloomfield.

Then I found Martin was also coauthor with Joseph T. Glatthaar of Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution. Collaboration seems to have been one of his skills.

And those are just some of his books. His oeuvre extends from Men In Rebellion: Higher Governmental Leaders and the Coming of the American Revolution to Insurrection: The American Revolution and Its Meaning, as well as edited collections. One of his retirement projects was a novel written with Robert Burris about an entirely different period of history.

At the time of his death, Martin was still working. His Revolutionary War projects included a book about Fort Ticonderoga and a study of just war theory. I hope collaborators can complete those projects.

It wasn’t till after I’d read some of James Kirby Martin’s books that I had the pleasure of meeting him at a conference produced by America’s History, L.L.C. Later I also saw him at the Fort Plain Museum conference. Because he studied the actual war part of the Revolution, Jim Martin knew that his work attracted a lot of interest outside the academy, and he was happy to chat with readers and researchers from all walks of life. We’ll miss him.

“Recalling the Revolution in New England” at the 2025 Dublin Seminar

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife has announced that its 27–28 June 2025 conference at Historic Deerfield will focus on the topic “Recalling the Revolution in New England.”

The seminar says:

On September 11, 1765, political leaders in Boston attached a plaque to a majestic elm and named it “Liberty Tree” to honor its role in an anti-Stamp Act protest the previous month. New Englanders thus started to commemorate the events of the American Revolution even before they had any idea there would be such a revolution. Over the following centuries, people from New England shaped the national memory of that era through schoolbooks, popular poetry, civic celebrations, monuments, and more.

On the 250th anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife welcomes proposals for papers and presentations that address the broad range of ways the people of New England have looked back on the nation’s founding—and what they forgot, or chose to forget, in the process.

For this year the seminar invites proposals for papers and presentations that illuminate how the peoples of the region have commemorated, memorialized, documented, invoked, fictionalized, and even forgotten the American Revolution through the Bicentennial period. Papers should examine events and trends in New England and adjoining regions.

The Seminar encourages papers grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and original research, particularly material and visual culture, manuscripts, government and business records, the public press, oral histories, and public history practice or advocacy. Papers addressing such contemporary themes as gender dynamics, racial dimensions, and environmental aspects of Revolutionary commemoration are strongly encouraged.

Some possible topics might include:

• Efforts to recover the stories of marginalized participants in the American Revolution
• The processes of local commemoration in orations, pageants, reenactments, and more
• Recreating and depicting the American Revolution in popular fiction, theater, prints, and toys
• The collecting and preservation of Revolutionary-era artifacts and material culture
• Activating, maintaining, and interpreting historic sites, battlefields, monuments, homes, and other spaces
• The formation and activities of historical societies and heritage organizations
• Contesting the memory and meaning of the American Revolution

Researchers whose proposals are accepted will be invited to prepare a 20-minute presentation of that work and present it on site in Deerfield. They’ll be expected to make a written version of about 7,000 words available for inclusion in the Dublin Seminar Proceedings.

The Seminar will convene on 27–28 June. That will be a hybrid program with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees. The conference keynote will be provided by Dr. Zara Anishanslin of the University of Delaware, author of the forthcoming book The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution.

To submit a proposal, scholars should prepare (as a single email attachment, in MS Word or as a PDF, labeled LASTNAME.DubSem2025) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and the archival, material, or visual sources on which it is grounded, followed by a one-page vita or biography. Send that to dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org by noon on Monday, 23 Jan 2025.

One last detail about the 2025 Dublin Seminar: I’m one of the co-chairs of the organizing committee along with Erica Lome of Historic New England.

“The Siege of Boston” Tour for Social-Studies Educators, 21 Nov.

The National Council for Social Studies, the largest professional association devoted to social studies education, will meet in Boston on 19–24 November. Over 3,000 classroom teachers and other educators from around the country are expected to come.

Attendees arriving before Thursday, 21 November, have a choice of two all-day tours, among other offerings. One is a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The other, which I’m involved in, is an exploration of “The Siege of Boston” in preparation for the Sestercentennial of that campaign.

This tour has been organized by Dr. Gorman Lee through Revolution 250, and he describes it this way:

The Siege of Boston refers to a significant period in colonial history when militias from the American colonies surrounded the British-occupied city of Boston. Teachers will visit five historical sites to explore how the Siege unfolded through the lenses of enslaved and free African Americans, Loyalists, women, and rank-and-file rebels.

The five significant historic sites are:

• The Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford, used by Gen. Charles Lee and Col. John Stark during the siege.
• The Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, site of the biggest, bloodiest, and ultimately decisive battle of the siege.
• Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site and nearby Cambridge common, from which Gen. George Washington and the Massachusetts committee of safety directed the siege.
• The Shirley-Eustis House in Roxbury, a former governor’s mansion used as a hospital.
• The Dillaway-Thomas House in Roxbury, from which Gen. John Thomas spearheaded the final move onto Dorchester Heights.

Prof. Robert J. Allison of Suffolk University will be the expert guide on the first leg of the tour. I’ll hop on in Cambridge, and gents from the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati will be awaiting us in Roxbury. Of course, the docents and curators at each site will share their knowledge.

That’s a packed itinerary, and I expect we’ll adjust the times spent at each site on the day based on time spent in traffic. I’ll try to bring along a store of stories to fill those moments.

This tour has a fee of $50 above the conference registration cost. Conference attendees can sign up for it through this webpage. (At least I think so. I can’t figure out the registration pages myself, but I expect educators have experience navigating that sort of complex bureaucratic system.) 

“Winning Independence” with General Washington

Here’s yet another video that’s interesting as a representation of the Revolution for modern Americans.

The modern Americans of 1932, that is.

That year, the U.S. of A. celebrated the 200th anniversary of George Washington’s birth, a division of Kodak called Eastman Classroom produced four fifteen-minute movies about him with the blanket title George Washington: His Life and Times.

The screenshots in this posting are from the installment “Winning Independence,” as put on YouTube by Periscope Films.

Though talking pictures had become standard entertainment by that time, schools still weren’t wired for sound, so these films were made as silent movies, with an emphasis on visuals.

Judging by the number of men shown, the battlefield scenes must have had high budgets. The image above shows grenadiers marching up Bunker Hill, looking very much like Howard Pyle’s painting of that scene. There are also animated maps.

The narrative is standard: Washington provides discipline for the army, loses New York, wins at Trenton and Princeton, loses Philadelphia the next year, learns enough at Valley Forge to win at Monmouth, and then there’s a jump over several years with just a quick mention of Charleston and Gen. Nathanael Greene before we arrive at Yorktown.

The credits thank William Randolph Hearst for the impressive scenes of Washington and his troops crossing the Delaware River on the night of 25–26 Dec 1776. Some of those shots match the 1924 feature Janice Meredith, starring Hearst’s inamorata Marion Davies.

The other movies in the series are “Conquering the Wilderness,” “United the Colonies,” and “Building the Nation.” 

“These are Sentiments, which we are obliged to express”

Yesterday I quoted the opening paragraphs of the Middlesex County Convention’s resolutions, adopted 31 Aug 1774.

I was struck hard by one trait of that declaration, evidently drafted for the convention by Jonathan Williams Austin.

That trait is clear in the closing paragraphs:

These are Sentiments, which we are obliged to express, as these Acts are intended immediately to take Place. We must now either oppose them, or tamely give up all we have been struggling for. It is this that has forced us so soon on these very important Resolves. However we do it with humble Deference to the Provincial and Continental Congress, by whose Resolutions we are determined to abide; to whom, and the World, we cheerfully appeal for the Uprightness of our Conduct.

On the whole, these are “great and profound Questions.” We are grieved to find ourselves reduced to the Necessity of entering into the Discussion of them. But we deprecate a State of Slavery. Our Fathers left a fair Inheritance to us, purchased by a Waste of Blood and Treasure. This we are resolved to transmit equally fair to our Children after us. No Danger shall affright, no Difficulties intimidate us. And if in support of our Rights we are called to encounter even Death, we are yet undaunted, sensible that HE can never die too soon, who lays down his Life in support of the Laws and Liberties of his Country.

For comparison, here’s the opening paragraph of the Suffolk County resolutions drafted by Dr. Joseph Warren and adopted on 9 September:

Whereas the power but not the justice, the vengeance but not the wisdom, of Great Britain, which of old persecuted, scourged and exiled our fugitive parents from their native shores, now pursues us, their guiltless children, with unrelenting severity; and whereas, this then savage and uncultivated desert was purchased by the toil and treasure, or acquired by the valor and blood, of those our venerable progenitors, who bequeathed to us the dear-bought inheritance, who consigned it to our care and protection,—the most sacred obligations are upon us to transmit the glorious purchase, unfettered by power, unclogged with shackles, to our innocent and beloved offspring. On the fortitude, on the wisdom, and on the exertions of this important day is suspended the fate of this New World, and of unborn millions. If a boundless extent of continent, swarming with millions, will tamely submit to live, move, and have their being at the arbitrary will of a licentious minister, they basely yield to voluntary slavery; and future generations shall load their memories with incessant execrations. On the other hand, if we arrest the hand which would ransack our pockets; if we disarm the parricide who points the dagger to our bosoms; if we nobly defeat that fatal edict which proclaims a power to frame laws for us in all cases whatsoever, thereby entailing the endless and numberless curses of slavery upon us, our heirs and their heirs for ever; if we successfully resist that unparelleled usurpation of unconstitutional power, whereby our capital is robbed of the means of life; whereby the streets of Boston are thronged with military executioners; whereby our coasts are lined, and harbors crowded with ships of war; whereby the charter of the colony, that sacred barrier against the encroachments of tyranny, is mutilated, and in effect annihilated; whereby a murderous law is framed to shelter villains from the hands of justice; whereby that unalienable and inestimable inheritance, which we derived from nature, the constitution of Britain, which was covenanted to us in the charter of the province, is totally wrecked, annulled and vacated,—posterity will acknowledge that virtue which preserved them free and happy; and, while we enjoy the rewards and blessings of the faithful, the torrent of panegyric will roll down our reputations to that latest period, when the streams of time shall be absorbed in the abyss of eternity.

That 402-word paragraph consists of only four sentences, with an average of 101 words each.

Long sentences are a hallmark of eighteenth-century prose—clauses piling up on top of each other, linked with colons and semicolons and dashes, building up to a final burst of eloquence (“when the streams of time shall be absorbed in the abyss of eternity”).

In contrast, the introductory and concluding paragraphs of the Middlesex County resolutions total to 473 words. Those fall into 19 sentences, about 25 words each. That’s practically modern in its sentence structure.

The two documents make a lot of the same arguments. It might be much easier for today’s students to grasp those points as expressed by the Middlesex County convention—but that text is not as widely available.

TOMORROW: At the Congress.

Some Museum Programs for School Vacation Week

Some of greater Boston’s Revolutionary sites have announced special programming for next week, which is a public school vacation in Massachusetts.

Thanks to support from the Highland Street Foundation, the Paul Revere House in the North End will be free to visit on Tuesday, 20 February.

On the two days that follow, the site is offering a drop-in family activity called “Share Your Love of the Written Word,” inspired by vintage postcards from its collection. Participating is free with admission. Regular admission is $6 for adults, $5.50 for seniors and college students, $1.00 for children 5-17, and free for members and North End residents.

Nearby, the Old North Church and Historic Site is usually closed to the public during the winter, but it will be open 17–24 February from 11:00 A.M. (12:30 P.M. on Sunday) to 5:00 P.M. Admission tickets, which costs $5 per person, include a self-guided tour of the church’s sanctuary, the current exhibit, and answers from the education staff. For $5 more one can enjoy a self-guided tour of the historic crypt and an audio guide.

Outside the city, the Concord Museum is promising unspecified “special family activities” on Monday, Thursday, and Friday, according to its calendar. That week is also the last chance to see the museum’s exhibit “Interwoven: Women’s Lives Written in Thread.” On Friday, 23 February, educator and reenactor Michelle Gabrielson will present the work of quilting a petticoat.

The Lexington Historical Society’s historic taverns will host special programs for kids of different ages on “Lighting the Way” and “Science and Medicine” during the vacation week. For more details, including the registration cost, visit its events page.

Upcoming Events on Revolutionary History at the M.H.S.

Here are three different types of online events coming up from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Tuesday, 6 February, 5:00 to 6:15 P.M.
Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar Series
“The Social World of Revolutionary New England”
Panel discussion with:

• Nicole Breault, University of Texas, El Paso
• Christopher Walton, Southern Methodist University
• Mark Peterson, Yale University

Nicole Breault’s research centers on Boston watchmen who walked the streets at night to monitor for signs of fire, distress, and disorder. Through night constables’ reports, orders governing watches, town records, acts of the General Court, and justice of the peace records, Breault’s paper examines local-level police training prior to the professionalization of law enforcement and more broadly, quotidian acquisitions of legal knowledge in early America.

Christopher Walton’s work examines how Congregational clergy in the Connecticut Valley ministered to their communities through suffering during the American Revolution. As the religious community dealt with sickness and death locally, it learned to respond piously to loss at the battlefront. Through suffering, religion became personal as individuals took solace in religious truth and cultivated piety.

Peterson, author of The City-State of Boston, will comment on Breault and Walton’s papers (which are available to seminar subscribers).

Register for “The Social World of Revolutionary New England” here.

Thursday, 15 February, 6:00 to 7:00 P.M.
“First Family: George Washington’s Heirs & the Making of America”
Cassandra Good, Marymount University,
in conversation with Sara Georgini, M.H.S.

While George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, they raised numerous children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure, and also meet the children he helped to raise. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye. Raised in the country’s first “first family,” they remained well-known not only as Washington’s family, but also as keepers of his legacy throughout their lives.

As the country grapples with concerns about political dynasties and the public role of presidential families, the saga of Washington’s family offers a human story of historical precedent.

Register for “First Family: George Washington’s Heirs & the Making of America” here. This is a free public event.


Monday and Tuesday, 19–20 February, 9:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.
“Perspectives on the Boston Massacre & the Legacy of Crispus Attucks”
Teacher Workshop

This two-day workshop is offered for Grade 3-12 educators with a focus on Grade 5, covering content relevant to Grade 5 Investigating History, Early U.S., 19th Century, and African American History.

On a cold night in March 1770, simmering conflict broke out into a riot between colonial Bostonians and British soldiers. Competing witness accounts from across all walks of Boston life made it difficult to know exactly what happened, but the night ended with the death of five colonists including Crispus Attucks, a Black and Indigenous sailor, and became a flashpoint in the conflict between colonists and British rule.

Eighty-five years later, Black historian and community leader William Cooper Nell brought Crispus Attucks back into the public’s consciousness, connecting Black participation in the Revolutionary Era to 19th-century abolitionists’ calls for emancipation and equal civil rights for Black Americans.

Using primary sources and resources from the MHS’ History Source, educators will:

• Explore conflicting witness testimonies and multiple perspectives from a diverse array of Bostonians.
• Investigate ways in which people of color have been both present for and critical actors in turning points in American history.
• Discuss how and why public memory of the Boston Massacre has changed over time–and how point of view influences our interpretation of the past.
• Model strategies for analyzing primary sources in the classroom.

This teacher workshop has a fee of $40 per person. Participants can earn P.D.P.’s or other professional credits—see the webpage for any additional fees. Register for “Perspectives on the Boston Massacre & the Legacy of Crispus Attucks” here.

“Education asks you to change.”

Drew Gilpin Faust, historian of the ante-bellum South and president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018, recently spoke to N.P.R. about her memoir of growing up in Virginia and going to high school in Concord, Necessary Trouble.

One topic that arose in that interview was the recent trend in some states to ban any school history lessons that might make some students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race,” to quote from Florida’s law.

One problem with such laws is that, while ostensibly opposed to racial thinking, they actually protect it. Why would a 21st-century student feel “discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish” about 19th-century slaveholders or 20th-century segregationists except by prioritizing an old idea of race over their supposedly modern ideals?

As many classroom teachers have pointed out, it’s impossible to accurately teach large swaths of modern history without discussing the concept of race and thus potentially triggering some students’ “discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish.”

One alternative—inaccurately teaching that history to avoid mentions of race—would provoke “discomfort” and “anguish” for students whose family members were oppressed by racist behavior and laws and see the state-directed lesson disregarding those experiences.

Faust offers another argument against the approach behind such laws:

It’s a betrayal of the commitment to truth and to fact. And it so undermines the ability of people in the present to understand who they are. How do we have history that’s not uncomfortable? How do we have any kind of education that doesn’t make you in some way uncomfortable? Education asks you to change.

The headmistress of my girls school many years ago said to us, “Have the courage to be disturbed, to learn about the Holocaust and see what evil can mean, to learn about slavery and think about exploitation that is empowered by an ideology of race that we haven’t entirely dismantled. Understand what people did in the past so that you can, in the present, better critique your own assumptions, your own blindnesses, and make a world that’s a better world.”

If we don’t acknowledge those realities, we are disempowered as human beings.

To be sure, some politicians don’t want all human beings, or even most, to be empowered.

A Revolution in Relating to the Environment

Last month the Journal of the Early Republic’s Panorama website published an essay by Blake McGready titled “Searching for a Reusable Past: Public History and the Revolutionary Origins of the Climate Crisis.”

McGready argues that historical sites are missing an opportunity to alert visitors to the effects of environmental changes, particularly the oncoming climate change.

Revolutionary-era sites can reach their audiences and remind them of the fearsome stakes of this moment by asking different, environmentally focused questions: How do ecological processes challenge understandings about space and boundaries? How has the natural, nonhuman world shaped the past, and how does it continue to shape our present? And what kinds of environmental relationships did the American Revolution produce?

Valley Forge rangers are already working to direct visitor attention towards the ways human-made environmental change exacerbates parkwide flooding. The Washington’s Headquarters railway embankment, erected for the Pennsylvania Railroad, now prevents the sloping land from reaching the riverside. During storms these tracks become a levee, pinning floodwaters into the lowlands around the structure. The construction of upriver single-family housing developments, which has accelerated during COVID-19, continues to clear trees and fill open space, intensifying runoff during storms. Structures like Washington’s Headquarters that sit at the confluence of creeks and rivers have become targets as water levels rise.

That example doesn’t strike me as ideal. Most people go to historic sites to feel transported back to the period when those places were “important,” not to hear about subsequent changes—like railway embankments and suburban development, in this case. Now I happen to like learning about both the history and the preservation of a site, but the latter is still the chocolate syrup, not the ice cream.

People would probably think about environmental change more if they’re part of the story from the start, as in perhaps a comparison of how the Valley Forge landscape was suddenly altered by the arrival of thousands of men building huts in 1777. How does that compare to the area’s current population? 

I know there are environmental historians working on integrating those factors into the larger Revolutionary narrative, as McGready discusses later:

public historians might reimagine the Revolution as a contest over environmental relationships. In 1779 General John Sullivan led the Continental Army’s invasion of Iroquoia, an expedition whose torrent of destruction devastated Seneca and Cayuga agroecosystems. Haudenosaunee women’s farming techniques produced superior yields compared with those of white colonists, nurtured healthier soils, supplied more nutritious diets, and cultivated sustainable practices for generations. Colonists, fastened to seasonal cycles of subsistence and profit, applied abusive farming practices to their lands. . . . By discussing the Sullivan Campaign, public historians can pull environment into their conversations about the American Revolution’s legacies, and invite audiences to think about how environmental relationships have been made and can be remade.

We do a lousy job of discussing the Sullivan Campaign already, though. Its sites aren’t preserved like others. We’re uncomfortable remembering the vicious attacks on civilian communities. The campaign’s success at breaking the Iroquois Confederacy makes it easy to treat it as a sideshow.

Examples aside, I think McGready’s main point is worth considering. It made me remember a visit to Bodiam Castle in southern England over a decade ago. Back then, U.S. media was still treating the likelihood of climate change as worthy of debate. In contrast, between the car park and the castle I came across a sign baldly stating that all the lovely riverine landscape in front of me was going to be underwater in a quarter-century or so.

That sort of message—coming with the authority of the site, tied to the visitor’s immediate experience, and linked to the hope to preserve that place—might be the most powerful approach.

“More than ever, historians must write to the present”

The Royal Historical Society’s Historical Transactions website recently shared David Armitage’s essay “The Impulse of the Present,” on “the value of presentist thinking for historical debate.”

Like politicians deploying the term “revisionist,” historians use “presentist” as a pejorative label for historical arguments that grate on them. But exactly what the problem is can vary from one observer to another. “Whatever presentism is,” Armitage writes, “historians generally agree on one thing: that they’re against it.”

Of course, one person’s presentism is another’s perspective, and changing perspective often leads to insights. Most people reading history, professional or not, can spot the folly of imposing one’s own understandings or outlook on people of the past. But historians use “presentist” to criticize other approaches, sometimes including being overly motivated to study certain questions because of current concerns—even if the study itself is rigorous.

Armitage rejects that, writing:

More than ever, historians must write to the present because people in that present demand accounting for the past and, by necessity, want historical answers to contemporary questions. ‘Like funerals, history-writing is for the living,’ remarks the historian of science Hasok Chang.

That aphorism is one among many signs that historians of science are ahead of most other historians in the sophistication and pragmatism of their attitude towards presentism. For example, my Harvard colleague Naomi Oreskes (‘Why I am a Presentist’) and the French historian of biology Laurent Loison (‘Forms of Presentism in the History of Science‘) have recently argued for what they variously call substantive, empirical, critical and motivational presentisms.

Substantive presentism assumes continuities between past and present that make at least some elements of the present usable as keys to unlock the past; this in turn empowers empirical presentism where, say, current scientific understandings of the aetiology of bubonic plague allow historians to analyse past epidemics using knowledge unavailable to past actors.

Critical presentism reverses the arrows of Whig history—’Tory’ history, perhaps?—by deploying historians’ sense of the complexity and contingency of the past to dethrone the pretensions of the present. This may dampen dogmatism by admitting all flesh is grass and this, too, shall pass.

Finally, what Oreskes has dubbed motivational presentism is the admission that how we choose our historical questions, as well as how we answer them, are far from innocent or disinterested acts: ‘What matters to us about the past,’ Oreskes argues, ‘has everything to do with who we are, where we live, and what we think is important—to us, here and now, in the present.’ Such frankness about our own motivations will not only allow historians to scrutinise our motivations more closely: it can equip us with more empathy for the swelling publics who demand understanding and accountability for past injustices.

My take on “presentism” has long been that it’s inescapable, so we should acknowledge our perspective from this time while doing what we can to understand how people of the past viewed the world. I take comfort in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. He has more to say in his chapter “In Defence of Presentism” in History and Human Flourishing, edited by Darrin McMahon and published by Oxford University Press this year. Among his several previous books is The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.

2026 Is Coming, and the New York Times Is On It!

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article by Jennifer Schuessler headlined “Will America Be Ready for Its 250th Birthday?”

As Schuessler noted, this isn’t the first time the newspaper asked such a question:

In 1973, Congress disbanded the original federal Bicentennial commission, after leaked documents suggested that Richard Nixon was seeking to manipulate it for political gain. In 1975, The New York Times reported that the impending celebration featured a crowded calendar but “an uncertain focus.”

And the history on view was not just a whitewashed celebration. There was a growing attention to complexity, contradiction and dissent, thanks to groups like the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation and the left-wing People’s Bicentennial Commission (which disrupted the official commemoration of the Boston Tea Party and even hung Ronald McDonald from a Liberty Tree).

One of the biggest legacies of the Bicentennial, scholars say, was a boom in popular interest in history, and what the scholar M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska in her book “History Comes Alive” calls a more emotional, personal engagement with the past.

The anniversary also generated major investments in history-related infrastructure, and not just in the places where Paul Revere rode or Betsy Ross sewed. According to an 1982 survey, as many as 40 percent of the nation’s roughly 23,000 historical organizations were created in the Bicentennial era.

Indeed, as a child of the Bicentennial myself, I have much more interest and faith in local organizations than in America250, the official United States Semiquincentennial Commission, headquartered in and focused on Philadelphia.

The article notes a March gathering of “300 people from three dozen states” to set up an independent network of historical organizations, including some from this region:

“It’s messy, because democracy’s messy,” said Nathaniel Sheidley, the president and chief executive of Revolutionary Spaces, which operates the Old South Meeting House and the Old State House in Boston. “There’s something fitting about it playing out in this way. If it were boxed and top down, would feel inauthentic to the history.”

At the gathering, there were presentations of research showing that Americans’ views of history are far less polarized than news coverage might suggest. And there was plenty of good-natured ribbing among attendees from Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania over whose revolutionary legacy was bigger and better.

But overall, the emphasis was less on soaring oratory than the nuts-and-bolts of legislation, funding and, for states beyond the original 13 colonies, ways to link the Semiquincentennial to their own histories.

That financial concern points to what I think is the biggest shift since 1976—not that American society is more or less politically divided and uncertain than before, but that the nation no longer shares a consensus on the basic value of government serving the public. The Bicentennial was closer to the New Deal, much closer to the Great Society, than it was to us today.

Constituting Comics

Constitution Illustrated by R. Sikoryak is a unique edition of the document that frames the government of the U.S. of A.

Each clause of that Constitution is, as the title says, illustrated. And in color yet.

The School Library Journal’s Good Comics for Kids website said:

This book is educational in more ways than one. Beyond the legal chronicle, each page is drawn to resemble a different comic strip or character. Sikoryak is an amazing mimic of art styles, so everyone from the Peanuts gang to the cast of G.I. Joe appears herein. An index lists his influences, crediting the original artists, listing the characters, and stating roughly when they originally appeared. This is a pocket-sized history of popular comics.

Sikoryak did an amazing job choosing the comics to emulate. Diverse characters drawn in the style of Raina Telgemeier stand in for “we the people”. Dennis the Menace appears on the page about age limits, Uncle Scrooge for taxes, Sgt. Rock for raising an army, and Beetle Bailey for the militia. Calvin and Hobbes view a field of arguing snowmen while, of course, Wonder Woman explains women’s suffrage.

Sikoryak is now working on a similar edition of the Declaration of Independence, and a mini black-and-white sampler (what the comics industry might once have called an “ashcan comic”) is available for sale.

The complete Declaration Illustrated volume is scheduled for publication in 2024. With some irony, the publisher of both volumes is Drawn & Quarterly, based in Canada.