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The Battle for 1776

Plans for America’s 250th birthday in 2026 are getting underway. But can the spirit of 1776 survive the history wars of 2021?

By Jennifer Schuessler

It’s been a tough year for 1776.

On Jan. 6, rioters entered the U.S. Capitol, some waving 13-starred “1776” flags. Two weeks later, President Trump’s 1776 Commission issued its report calling for “patriotic education,” which painted progressives as enemies of the timeless values of the founding.

And in recent months, “1776” has been a rallying cry for conservative activists taking the fight against critical race theory to local school boards across the country, further turning an emblem of national identity into a culture-war battering ram.

These efforts have drawn condemnation from many of the nation’s historians, who see them as attempts to suppress honest discussion of the past, and play down the role race and slavery have played in shaping the nation from the beginning. But as planning for America’s 250th birthday in 2026 gets underway, some historians are also asking if the story they tell of the founding has gotten too dark.

For scholars, the rosy tale of a purely heroic unleashing of freedom may be long gone. But does America still need a version of its origin story it can love?

The story historians tell about the American Revolution has changed enormously since the Bicentennial. Uplifting biographies of the founding fathers may still rule the best-seller list (and Broadway ). But these days, scholars depict the Revolution less as a glorious liberty struggle than as a hyper-violent civil war that divided virtually every segment of colonial society against itself, and left many African Americans and Native Americans worse off, and less free .

Today’s historians aren’t in the business of writing neat origin stories — complexity, context and contingency are their watchwords. But in civic life, where we stake our beginnings matters.

“Every nation has to have a story,” said Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian at Harvard whose new book “On Juneteenth” parses the elisions and simplifications at the heart of various origin narratives.

“We’re arguing now about the content of that story, and finding the balance,” she said. “If you think the United States was a good idea, you don’t want people to think the whole effort was for nothing, or was meaningless or malign.”

In a recent essay about teaching the American Revolution, Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Harvard, argued that historians need to do more to shore up “our fragile democracy.” The “latest, best scholarship,” she writes, “is brave and fresh and true, all of which is necessary. But it is not, in the end, sufficient.”

And it’s a problem that Kamensky — the lead historian for Educating for American Democracy , a new cross-ideological civics education initiative launched last spring — believes has only grown more urgent.

“We as a profession are very invested in originality, which means toppling,” she said. “I think originality also means discovery and building. We ignore history’s responsibility to help plot a way forward at our peril.”

Whose Revolution?

Americans have been fighting over the history — and mythology — of the Revolution from almost the moment it ended. “There’s no one memory of the Revolution,” said Michael Hattem, the author of “Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution.” “And the way we remember it has always been shaped by contemporary circumstances.”

As its public mythology evolved, various groups laid claim to its memory and symbols, as a way of defining the nation and anchoring themselves to citizenship. It was Black abolitionists of the 1840s who first promoted the story of Crispus Attucks, the mixed-race Black and Native American sailor said to be the first to die for the Revolution in the Boston Massacre.

For Irish immigrants in post-Civil War New England, claiming spiritual descent from the Revolution became a way of claiming Americanness , while white Yankees sought to preserve the spirit of 1776 as their inheritance through blood.

Those fractures, and fears of “losing” the true Revolution, have carried forward. Today, the Bicentennial of 1976 may be remembered mostly for its explosion of commercialism and “Buy-cetennial” kitsch, as well as celebratory spectacles like a re-enactment of the signing of the Declaration of Independence that drew a reported million people to Philadelphia.

But it came at a moment of extraordinary national division, in the wake of Watergate and the withdrawal from Vietnam. After surviving “some of the bitterest times in our history,” the official commission’s final report declared, “we cried out for something to draw us together again.”

Some saw the task differently. The Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation , a private nonprofit group, worked to designate new Black history landmarks, and organized events like a dramatic reading by James Earl Jones of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

And the People’s Bicentennial Commission, a left-wing group founded by the activist Jeremy Rifkin, aimed to recover what it saw as the true, radical spirit of the founding that had been swept aside by big business. At one protest, they burned President Gerald Ford in effigy. At another, Ronald McDonald was hanged from an ersatz liberty tree .

The group drew alarm in Washington. In a May 1976 report titled “The Attempt to Steal the Bicentennial,” a congressional subcommittee denounced it as a front for “organizations of the revolutionary left which seek to pervert the legitimate meaning of the American Revolution.”

Beyond the Founding Fathers

The Bicentennial also kicked off a boom in scholarship on the Revolution , which sometimes spawned bitter disputes between historians focused on recovering the experiences of marginalized people and those taking a more celebratory, elites-centric view.

Within the historical profession, at least, those pitched battles have cooled. If there’s a keystone text of the current scholarship, it’s Alan Taylor’s “American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804,” a kaleidoscopic synthesis published in 2016. Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, takes in actors and events far beyond the 13 colonies and the founding fathers, casting a cool, antiheroic eye on the Revolution’s costs for many.

Today, inclusion — geographic, demographic — is also a core theme for those organizing the 2026 commemoration, from the official U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission on down.

At the Smithsonian Institution, that means promoting the idea of “the many 1776s,” to quote the title of an exhibition to be held across the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Latino Center.

“Even places distant from where the Revolution was being fought still had a profound influence on the country as we know it today,” Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s under secretary for museums and culture, said.

Gover, a former director of the Museum of the American Indian, said he expected some partisans “would play football” with 1776, but the Smithsonian’s goal was to “treat it with respect.”

“For us, treating it with respect means telling the truth, as well as we can, and really encouraging people to embrace the complexity,” he said.

A Living Declaration

That may be a tall order in 2021, amid the continuing furor ignited by the 1619 Project , an initiative by The New York Times Magazine that explores the history and continuing legacy of slavery, positing the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia that year as the nation’s “very origin.” It has sparked intense scholarly and partisan debate, along with celebratory countercampaigns focused on 1620 , 1776 , and (in Texas) 1836 .

Philip Mead, the chief historian of the Museum of the American Revolution, which opened in Philadelphia in 2017, said he hoped the 250th anniversary would help move past the perception of American history as either hagiographic or iconoclastic.

“We need to try to handle it warts and all,’’ he said, “and to make the conversation more overtly a conversation, rather than an adversarial debate.”

The museum doesn’t stint on the underside of the Revolution . One exhibit explores how, for African Americans, thousands of whom fled to British lines, “sometimes freedom wore a red coat.” Another explores the predicament of Native Americans, whose nations forged whatever alliances might best preserve their sovereignty.

“It’s important to acknowledge not just the disappointments of the Revolution, but the really dark outcomes,” Mead said.

What we need from 1776, he said, isn’t an origin story, but a transformation story. “We learn who we are by understanding how we have changed,” he said. “And the Revolution was a huge inflection point in that change.”

The museum’s Semiquincentennial exhibit will focus on the legacy of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a document whose interpretation lies at the heart of today’s hyper-polarized history wars.

Should it be celebrated as a transcendent statement of freedom and equality embraced by Frederick Douglass , Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony , and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Or was it just a philosophical fig leaf hung over a grubby war to defend white liberty grounded in slavery and Native dispossession (and equally useful as a model for South Carolina’s declaration of secession in 1860)?

How you see things depends in part on where you stand. In 2017, when Kamensky started teaching a new class on the Revolution steeped in the best new scholarship, the ethos was “skeptical detachment from the founding mythology.”

She was taken aback when one student, a third-generation Minuteman re-enactor, later told her he had hung up his tricorn and musket. “It’s all garbage and lies,” he told her (putting it more strongly). “Who could be proud of that?”

Kamensky revised her course. Next time, the session on the Declaration’s promise and limits ended with the group reading it together out loud.

“Everyone was in tears,” she said. “But I would not pretend to say they were the same tears for everybody.”

A Democracy … If We Can Keep It?

Even some scholars whose work has most powerfully chipped away at the Whiggish view of the Revolution as unleashing a steady march to universal liberty and equality say they are uneasy at what they see as its hijacking by anti-democratic extremists.

Taylor ’s “American Revolutions” may be short on uplift or admiring odes to the wisdom of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. But in his class lectures at the University of Virginia, he said, he always tries to connect back to the founders’ understanding of the republic as a living organism which, if not constantly defended by engaged citizens, will “dissolve.”

“The founders had a very clear understanding of that,” Taylor said. “We have a much less clear understanding.”

Robert Parkinson, an associate professor at Binghamton University in New York, is the author of “Thirteen Clocks,” a recent study of how patriot leaders exploited fears of rebellious slaves and “merciless Indian savages” (as the Declaration puts it) to rally colonists to the cause.

“1776 really gets a pass,” Parkinson said. “Race was at the center of how the founding actually happened.”

Still, at the first meeting of his American Revolution class after the 2016 election, Parkinson found himself pivoting to talk about Enlightenment values, and the fragility of democracy. “It was way more patriotic than I usually go,” he said.

It was also, he said, in line with where Americans found themselves in 1776, when — as now — the situation was constantly changing, the stakes were high, the future uncertain.

“Returning to that kind of freshness is another way of talking about the founding,” Parkinson said. “It’s a different kind of usable past.”

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the year in which the Museum of the American Revolution opened. It was 2017, not 2014.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Crispus Attucks, the mixed-race Black and Native American man said to be the first to die for the American Revolution in the Boston Massacre. He was a sailor, not a soldier.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the year a congressional subcommittee released the report “The Attempt to Steal the Bicentennial.” It came out in 1976, not 1776.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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1776 (Book Review)

Reviewed by Harris J. Andrews By David McCullough Simon and Schuster, 2005

David McCullough’s 1776 is one of those well-crafted popular histories that is certain to feature prominently on every history buff’s reading list this summer. The Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer brings all of his formidable writing skills into play, recounting the tumultuous military campaigns of a year that saw the fortunes of George Washington’s fledgling Continental Army—and with it those of the new American republic—rise and fall: from a brilliant and unexpected success at the siege of Boston through failure and defeat in the fighting around New York and New Jersey to redemption in the freezing streets of Trenton.

McCullough’s book is pure, traditional narrative history. He bases much of his account on the actions and experiences of the great leaders: Patriot Generals George Washington, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox and their British opponents the Howe brothers, Sir Henry Clinton and Charles Cornwallis.

But McCullough also includes a chorus of spear-carriers—common soldiers, camp followers, civilian bystanders and politicians. The author employs a poet’s ear in his selection of wonderful quotes drawn from more than 50 diaries, memoirs and collections of correspondence to support his own lively narration. McCullough’s primary focus, however, remains firmly fixed on George Washington’s conduct of military operations and his constant determination to create a well-organized, professional fighting force out of the dispirited, sick and ragged volunteers and militiamen who formed his army.

As enjoyable as the book is, 1776 recounts an oft-told tale, one that has attracted the attention of many historians over the years. While McCullough ably pulls together masses of information, 1776 does not offer much that is new, nor does it offer fresh insights into the lives and character of the primary actors.

McCullough’s descriptions of military operations are fairly clear but suffer from a lack of the informative maps required for military historiography. The inclusion of reproductions of three period maps in the illustration sections does not adequately fill the void.

1776 remains a riveting and moving tale of the year that saw the proclamation of American independence and the descent of the full might of the British empire to crush it. Overall, David McCullough tells a powerful and well-crafted story that is worth the read.

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The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum

The 1619 Project

Americans have often been politically divided, never more so than during the Civil War, in which we managed to kill more than 600,000 of each other. But have the divisions over how we recount our history ever been so deep? Following the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country in 2020, at least four states, three of them in New England, have required Black history to be part of school curriculums; seven more have established new courses on Native American or Asian American history. Meanwhile Florida governor Ron DeSantis has gotten far more attention for forbidding the state’s high schools from offering the Advanced Placement course in African American history, which he criticized as “woke” and “indoctrination”—a ban that stood even after the College Board timidly watered down the course’s content.

The Florida legislature has passed the Stop WOKE Act, which forbids instruction that says someone must feel guilty or ashamed about past actions by “other members of the same race, color, sex or national origin.” Idaho has banned schools from claiming that any people “by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past.” Iowa now forbids teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.” Other red states are rushing down the same path, seeing political gold in denunciations of shaming.

For all their thunder about how schools should not make us ashamed of our history, Republican politicians have said far less about what should be taught. But a fascinating, detailed picture of their dream educational agenda is there for the downloading from the website of Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale is a small Christian school in Michigan whose campus has a shooting range and statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It is known for its deeply conservative worldview, expressed in online courses that it claims 3.5 million students have taken; in a Washington outpost, the Allan P. Kirby Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, which hard-right activist Ginni Thomas helped establish; and in teacher-training seminars, a nationwide network of charter schools, and close ties with red-state governors and education departments. Florida, for example, offers a $3,000 bonus to schoolteachers who take a Hillsdale-designed civics training course. When President Donald Trump, furious at The New York Times Magazine ’s 1619 Project and its portrayal of slavery as central to American history, appointed a 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education,” its chair was Hillsdale’s longtime president, Larry Arnn. Other Hillsdale alumni were sprinkled throughout the Trump administration.

More recently, Hillsdale officials have been helping Governor DeSantis review textbooks and revise Florida’s school curriculum. When DeSantis appointed half a dozen new trustees of New College of Florida, the honors college of the state university system, whose reputation for liberalism exasperated him, one was a professor and dean from Hillsdale. These trustees ousted New College’s president, and DeSantis’s chief of staff said he hoped the campus would now become a “Hillsdale of the South.”

The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum —which covers American history, government, and civics for kindergarten through high school—is a vast effort to prove that we have nothing to be ashamed of. It totals 3,268 pages at this writing and may be longer by the time you read this, because its creators have been adding new material. It does not take the place of textbooks—although it suggests which to use, repeatedly recommending one by a Hillsdale professor—but it provides teachers with quiz and exam questions, historical documents, and guidelines for what to discuss with their students. (There’s also a separate Hillsdale science curriculum. More about that another day.)

The 1776 Curriculum starts from the premise that “America is an exceptionally good country” and continues in that spirit. George Washington looms large, and we hear about him and the cherry tree, although this is acknowledged to be a “legend.” Kindergarten through second-grade students should be encouraged to learn by heart some of Washington’s “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” such as “Be not apt to relate news if you know not the truth thereof.” (Rupert Murdoch, too, might do well to learn this one by heart.) Teachers are urged to “conduct a round robin reading of the poem ‘Paul Revere’s Ride.’ Then discuss it with students and begin to have them learn parts of the poem by heart. Plan two days for each student to recite their parts aloud.” When they get to the American Revolution, they should ask students, “How did George Washington inspire his soldiers at Valley Forge?”

Just as the words of the Bible are sacred to evangelicals, the 1776 Curriculum treats the classic documents of American history as sacred texts. When it reaches the third-through-fifth-grade level, for example, it says of the Declaration of Independence:

Like an organizational mission statement, the Declaration is…a guiding star for our political life, and a benchmark for measuring our public institutions. Americans should consider all questions concerning the public sphere in light of the truths asserted in the Declaration. The Declaration of Independence should be both the beginning and end for students’ understanding of their country, their citizenship, and the benefits and responsibilities of being an American.

Most of Hillsdale’s other sacred texts are familiar, such as the Mayflower Compact, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech—which, the 1776 Curriculum is quick to point out, refers respectfully to the Declaration as a “promissory note” to all Americans. But along with these documents is one from a less expected source: Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge? Hillsdale likes Silent Cal not only because he was in favor of “limited government” but because of his 1926 speech “The Inspiration of the Declaration of Independence,” which is strongly recommended for both middle and high school students. In it he declared:

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

That takes care of any concern that developments in the two and a half centuries since 1776 might require the country’s “organizational mission statement” to be updated.

The 1776 Curriculum does not soft-pedal slavery, calling it “barbarous and tyrannical.” But it urges teachers to

consider with students the significance of the Constitution not using the word “slave” and instead using “person.” Refusing to use the word “slave” avoided giving legal legitimacy to slavery…. The use of the word “person” forced even slaveholders to recognize the humanity of the slave

—a claim those enslavers would have strenuously denied. And there is no mention at all of so much that accompanied slavery: widespread rape, for example, and the way slave sales shattered families. Thomas Jefferson’s name appears hundreds of times, but Sally Hemings’s never.

Similarly, the curriculum suggests that teachers tell their students about “George Washington’s time as a surveyor,” but nothing about the fortune he made speculating in land that had recently been occupied by Native Americans. In fact, the entire matter of how the nation’s territory was wrested away from its original inhabitants is skimmed over quickly: “The contact between indigenous North American and European civilizations resulted in both benefits and afflictions for natives and colonists alike” and was troubled by many “misunderstandings.”

Also of note in the 1776 Curriculum is its enthusiasm for something enshrined in another sacred text, the Constitution. The wise Electoral College system, middle and high school students should be told, has “forced presidential candidates to address the concerns not merely of large population centers like cities but also of rural and more remote populations.” Not mentioned is that the Electoral College also allows a candidate to become president while losing the popular vote—and tempts sore losers to manipulate the system. Appearing before the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021, invasion of the US Capitol, the majority leader of the Michigan State Senate testified that one of those who pressured him to submit to the House a false, alternate slate of pro-Trump electors was Robert E. Norton II, vice-president of Hillsdale.

To its credit, the 1776 Curriculum includes voices it abhors; there are, for example, several speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But it makes clear how students should read them. By the time of the New Deal, the country was burdened by “the so-called fourth branch [of government] called the bureaucracy or the administrative state.” Among proposed quiz questions is “How does the administrative state violate the principle of separation of powers?” And harking back to the sacred Declaration is the suggestion that “students should…consider whether political life under centralized, bureaucratic rule might be understood to resemble the rule of a faraway parliament or king.”

The most notable thing about the 1776 Curriculum , however, is what is not in it. Its view of American history is all politics and no economics. It praises the right to vote (conceding that it took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to fully enforce that right), trial by jury, and the separation of powers. All these, of course, are splendid principles, but they do not take account of the fact that ever more power is not political. Today Walmart has nearly twice as many employees as the entire active-duty US military. Washington lobbyists outnumber members of Congress roughly twenty to one (that’s just the registered lobbyists), and they often take a hand in drafting laws. Many state governments reliably bow to the power of major industries: petrochemicals in Louisiana, for instance, or coal in West Virginia. For a century and a half, economic power has been increasingly concentrated in corporate empires and the families who own them. A study a few years ago found that the three richest Americans possessed more wealth than the poorest 160 million, and the disparities since then have only grown. It’s a far cry from “all men are created equal.”

Moreover, economic power helps shape the climate of ideas, which in turn shapes politics. Donations from ultrawealthy right-wing families are responsible, for example, for tiny Hillsdale—with some 1,600 undergraduates—having an endowment approaching $1 billion. Among its supporters have been the Koch brothers and the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and her brother, Erik Prince, the founder of the military and security contractor Blackwater and a Hillsdale graduate.

More broadly, missing from the 1776 Curriculum is the idea that constitutional rights are only a beginning. Not only is there a vast gulf in wealth, but because of the way wealth, or its absence, gets passed down through the generations, we are still living with the consequences of slavery. The median white American household has eight times the wealth of the median Black household, a gap that has changed little for decades. The 1776 Curriculum praises the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres of public land to families who agreed to farm it, as a boon to both immigrants and “freedmen,” but neglects to mention that racist officials and lack of capital prevented all but a handful of the newly freed from taking advantage of it. The catalog of such inequalities could be much longer. However enlightened the sacred texts may be, they alone are not sufficient building blocks for a truly fair and just society.

If the 1776 Curriculum is in one corner of the ring in this round of the history wars, in the other corner, coming out swinging, is the latest incarnation of the 1619 Project. First presented as articles in The New York Times Magazine , then as a podcast series, lesson plans for schools, and a book, the project took its name from the year that the first shipload of captive Africans for sale arrived in the new colony of Virginia—a year before the traditionally celebrated landing of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts. The project argued that slavery and its legacy have profoundly shaped American life in the four centuries since then. This effort has now taken new shape as a six-part documentary series on Hulu, which will undoubtedly be used in many classrooms as well.

Sean Proctor/The New York Times/Redux

A statue of Ronald Reagan on the campus of Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, 2016

The series is not without flaws, and some are no fault of the creators. Many thorny problems face Black Americans today: that intractable wealth gap, the de facto resegregation of our schools, the drab and low-paying jobs available for people who graduate from them, the grim legacy of housing discrimination, and the myriad new laws in Republican-controlled states designed to chip away at the number of Black voters. These are all far less dramatic than the great marches for civil rights, Bull Connor’s police force attacking peaceful demonstrators with batons and dogs in Birmingham, Alabama, and the vast crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. and others addressed at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Such events were central to documentaries of several decades ago, such as Henry Hampton’s classic Eyes on the Prize series for PBS (two parts, 1987 and 1990) or the excellent Freedom on My Mind (1994) by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford. But to its credit, the 1619 Project’s documentary shows very little familiar footage of the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and instead takes on the tough issues of today.

Some problems might have been avoided. In the first episode of the series, the host and 1619 Project originator Nikole Hannah-Jones stubbornly sticks to a contention that in earlier versions drew criticism from historians. The proclamation by Lord Dunmore, the British governor of colonial Virginia, granting freedom to enslaved men who joined the British army to fight rebels against the Crown, she says, was a “tipping point” in drawing their outraged owners to the revolutionary cause. There’s no question that Dunmore’s proclamation infuriated them. But a tipping point it was not, for by the time he issued it in November 1775, the revolt against the British was already underway. Nearly five months earlier, George Washington had donned his uniform as commander of the Continental Army. And his fellow Virginia enslaver Patrick Henry had given his influential “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech months before that.

What audience does the 1619 Project documentary address? Implicitly all of us, but that is no easy path to follow in a nation riven by identity politics. Throughout the series, Hannah-Jones is both the narrator and the on-screen interviewer, sometimes with almost as much to say as the person she is interviewing. She takes the viewer to Waterloo, Iowa, where she grew up; to Mississippi, where her father was born to sharecroppers; and to New York, where she has lived as an adult. We see her old home movies and photos, hear about members of her extended family, and meet one of her cousins. This narrative strategy differs from that of Eyes on the Prize , whose episodes had a variety of directors and kept the interviewers more in the background, and from the 1619 Project’s book, whose chapters, to its benefit, are by many different authors. Seeing slavery and its long aftereffects entirely through Hannah-Jones will be powerful for those who can identify with her. But a different approach might invite more viewers. Six hours is a long time for one figure to dominate the screen, no matter who it is.

Again and again, however, Hannah-Jones tackles the dark sides of history that the upbeat 1776 Curriculum ignores. The second episode, for instance, focuses on women. She interviews a historian who talks about the crucial importance, in an otherwise patrilineal legal system, of the 1662 Virginia law declaring that children born to Black mothers—so often the result of rape by white men—“would have the status of their mothers…. They were enslavable.” Such men had an incentive to rape enslaved women or to force selected pairs of their human property to “breed,” because it increased their labor supply. With another historian, Hannah-Jones discusses the nineteenth-century journal of Fanny Kemble, the British wife of a Georgia plantation owner, who notes that many slave children she sees bear a striking facial resemblance to a father-son pair of white overseers.

Other episodes zero in on more matters that the no-shame Hillsdale worldview evades: the wealth gap, for example, and some of its causes. We see color-coded maps that show how, for nearly thirty years, 98 percent of federal housing loans went to white families. And we hear about the powerful southern congressional committee chairmen who forced New Deal programs like Social Security to exclude categories of labor in which Blacks were concentrated, like domestic and agricultural work. In the episode dealing with police brutality, the series effectively uses footage of a number of the appalling police killings of unarmed Black Americans that have taken place in recent years, much of it from the officers’ own body cameras.

One portion of that hour is unexpectedly inspiring. In the tense summer of 2020, several dozen New York City police officers besiege the home of the Black Lives Matter organizer Derrick Ingram, trying to arrest him for allegedly shouting through a megaphone into an officer’s ear. Ingram wisely deadbolts and chains his apartment door shut and demands to see a warrant for his arrest, which the police do not have. Meanwhile, between phone calls to lawyers, he streams the entire six-hour standoff on Instagram Live, broadcasting the shouts of the officers and video of him replying to them calmly. A helicopter circles overhead, and sharpshooters are positioned nearby. Supporters soon gather in the street outside, eventually outnumbering the police and shouting in unison, “Where’s the warrant! Where’s the warrant!” A camera pans across their faces, mostly masked against Covid: Black, white, brown, almost all young. Finally the police, defeated, withdraw.

If you have the right kind of subscription to Hulu you don’t have to endure commercials, but the rest of us can’t avoid them. It was eerie to watch this series, which deals with the harsh heritage of human beings as property, and see it repeatedly interrupted by advertisements for other types of property: upscale furniture, vacation resorts, sleek cars, Peloton bikes, Chanel perfume. And perhaps because projected viewer data told ad agencies that many Black people would be watching, a high proportion of the models exuberantly enjoying all these goods were Black. Yet many of the people on the screen between the ads could never afford the products shown. This is the dream fed to us again and again, the green light Gatsby sees on the distant dock: the myth that as an American you will finally, magically, have everything you want.

The reality of life in this country, shown eloquently in the forceful fourth episode of the series, “Capitalism,” is that a high percentage of Black Americans have long been stuck in dead-end jobs. And here Hannah-Jones pulls off a stunning juxtaposition. One scene takes us to an archive where the historian Caitlin Rosenthal displays a ledger from a Mississippi plantation called Pleasant Hill. For a week in September 1850, columns filled by graceful copperplate handwriting with curling flourishes on the capital letters show first the name of an enslaved person—one name only: Sandy, Scott, Solomon, Bill, Jerry, Isaac—then, day by day, Monday through Saturday, the exact number of pounds of cotton each had picked. If there’s no figure for cotton picked on a particular day, a word or two in the column explains the reason: runaway, sick, or a female giving birth. And of course these men and women were all at risk of being whipped if they did not pick cotton fast enough. “This is like an assembly line,” says Rosenthal.

Then the film cuts to another kind of assembly line, in an Amazon warehouse. One such warehouse, on Staten Island, was the scene of the first successful attempt to form a labor union at an Amazon facility in the US. More than 60 percent of the low-wage workers at this warehouse are Latino or Black. Derrick Palmer, a high school graduate and Black union activist who has worked there for six years, also talks about picking—picking the innumerable items ordered from Amazon and swiftly packaged and shipped. Every time you order something on the Amazon website, Palmer explains, it shows up on the computer of someone like him at a warehouse: “I’ve picked, on an average, 350 to 400 items an hour. They push you to pick 400.” The workers are allotted seven seconds to scan the barcode for each. We see packages with the familiar logo zipping down a chute of rollers to be loaded onto trucks and rushed to us.

Then it’s back to the Pleasant Hill plantation ledger, a different page now. Each line across it has four columns: an enslaved person’s name, age, “value at commencement of the year,” and “value at end of the year.” That change might be due to the current market price of human beings and on the individual’s age, skills, health, or, for a woman, record of bearing healthy babies who would eventually have value themselves. On the facing page of the ledger is a similar list of values for the plantation’s horses, mules, and cattle. In one of her occasional overstatements, Hannah-Jones claims that American capitalism was “born on the plantation,” which is not really true. But what is true is the centrality of human property in this country’s history. At the time of the Civil War, the monetary value of the country’s enslaved men, women, and children was greater than that of all its factories and railroads combined.

The interweaving of those two storylines—which enraged the National Review ’s critic, who called it “morally offensive”—doesn’t explicitly claim that Amazon’s workers are slaves. Of course they’re not: at the workday’s end they are not whipped or sold; they are free to go home and spend the evening watching TV commercials for impossibly expensive products and credit card consolidation loans. But this masterful part of the series is a powerful and unsettling reminder of just how deeply the slave economy reduced human beings not merely to labor but to precisely measurable quantities of labor—and of how a vast corporation most of us now order from does exactly the same thing.

Forget Ron DeSantis’s bombast about how we shouldn’t feel shamed for something that happened two centuries ago; this is something shameful that is part of our national life now . Its victims are of all colors, but disproportionately Black and brown. Seeing their working conditions depicted on the screen leaves you feeling that the fight by the country’s ill-paid workers to better their lives, like the unionization drive at Amazon and many other businesses, is a crusade for human dignity that deserves the same honor and support as the great civil rights demonstrations that stirred the national conscience more than half a century ago. And wasn’t that the message of Martin Luther King Jr. in his final campaign, supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he met his death?

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1776 Paperback – June 27, 2006

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• Print length 386 pages
• Language English
• Publication date June 27, 2006
• Reading age 14 - 18 years
• Dimensions 6.13 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0743226720
• ISBN-13 978-0743226721
• Lexile measure 1300L
• See all details

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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

Copyright © 2005 by David McCullough

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (June 27, 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 386 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743226720
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743226721
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 - 18 years
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1300L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• #11 in American Revolution Biographies (Books)
• #17 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
• #49 in American Military History

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About the author

David mccullough.

David McCullough has twice received the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams, and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback; His other widely praised books are 1776, Brave Companions, The Great Bridge, and The Johnstown Flood. He has been honored with the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Customers find the book fascinating, enjoyable, and terrific. They also describe the history as engaging and marvelous. Readers praise the writing quality as well-written and easy to read. They find the book informative, compelling, and well-documented. In addition, they appreciate the rich characters to follow. Opinions are mixed on the pacing, with some finding it fast and quick, while others say it's rushed.

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Customers find the book fascinating, enjoyable, and terrific. They say it's helpful to read about our country's history and the army that suffered much to ensure we have a good life. Readers also mention the book provides insight into the key players during that pivotal year in American history.

"...The way the whole year was narrated was done in an entertaining way and made all of the people involved in the events of the year come to life." Read more

"...It also may have to do with the fact that he writes very entertaining and engaging histories, not the the typical dry-as-dust academic fare that is..." Read more

"...The book is very interesting and tells history in a way that makes the familiar but lifeless face on our all quarter coins come alive as a fallible,..." Read more

"...1776 is popular history at its best. It is easy to read, yet filled with information ...." Read more

Customers find the history in the book entertaining and engaging. They say the narrative describes the near-thing of the American Revolution. Readers also mention that the historical figures come alive, especially the cast of main characters. In addition, they describe the book as an excellent book on the revolution that ends in a peaceful formation of a republic.

"Set in the busy year of 1776, the author narrates a compelling story full of the intricacies of war, rebellion, and intrigues that naturally occur..." Read more

"...have to do with the fact that he writes very entertaining and engaging histories , not the the typical dry-as-dust academic fare that is standard in..." Read more

"...I like that it focuses completely on one year ...." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book excellent. They mention it's well-written, easy to read, and entertaining. Readers also appreciate the actual letters written by soldiers and officers. In addition, they say the author is an excellent writer who tells history through the individual.

"...Dickens (a writer whom he is said to admire) and his talent for visual descriptions are superb (McCullough is also a painter)...." Read more

"...1776 is popular history at its best. It is easy to read , yet filled with information...." Read more

" So well written - if you’re struggling having a bad day thinking you can’t do your life because it’s too hard - or if you don’t believe in America..." Read more

"...McCullough's style was easy to read and entertaining and he even brought the British perspective somewhat to light...." Read more

Customers find the book informative, compelling, and well-documented. They say it provides great insight into the workings of the legislative body at the time. Readers also mention the research is phenomenal, staggering, and helps them understand the challenges our founding fathers had to create this great nation.

"...alive as a fallible, brave, committed, weary, frustrated, patient, inspiring , indecisive man...." Read more

"... McCullough's research is prodigious , and the journal entries and letters from "regular" soldiers were rather interesting...." Read more

"Very entertaining and informative read . My 5th grade social studies instruction will improve greatly this year due to the contents of this book...." Read more

"...As with everything else McCullough has written, 1776 is both informative and enjoyable...." Read more

Customers find the characters rich and well-developed. They appreciate the detailed personality descriptions and great insight into the person of George Washington. Readers also mention the book is comprehensive while keeping the personalities lively.

"...was made by Washington and his troops, and how the heroic Washington was so very human ." Read more

"...and the journal entries and letters from "regular" soldiers were rather interesting ...." Read more

"...become real characters in a real play, and McCullough gives us rich characters to follow ..." Read more

"...And it was. The detail, the personality descriptions , the details of battle, etc., etc. Couldn't ask for much better, McCullough at his best...." Read more

Customers find the book well worth the money and time. They say it's a wonderful tribute and collectible.

"... Well worth the time to read this unique narrative concerning our Nation's birth." Read more

"... It's worth it ." Read more

"Well written and deserving of every generous word ever said of any book in history. Here, McCullough is master on display." Read more

"...Definitely worth it ." Read more

Customers find the pictures in the book clear, concise, and vivid. They appreciate the ample portraits, graphics, and maps. Readers also mention the book gives a very detailed view of the beginning of the war, Washington's initiation, and the beautiful presentation of historical documents and letters.

"...He shows in remarkable clarity how George Washington struggled both outwardly and inwardly to create a well-organized, professional fighting force..." Read more

"...As if McCullough's style wasn't realistic enough, there are ample portraits , graphics, and maps in this book to give the reader a real feel for the..." Read more

"...It is filled with personal letters of Washington , American officers, and excerpts from diaries of many different soldiers; revealing how..." Read more

"...He also paints very vivid of pictures of battles , placing the reader in the middle of the action to the point where you can almost hear the cannon..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some mention it's fast-paced and a quick page-turner, while others say it's rushed and unconnected.

"A quick , informative, interesting read about the start of the Revolutionary War with a focus on George Washington. Definitely worth it." Read more

"...He found his new recruits to be very inexperienced and undisciplined - not only did they not wash their clothes and dig latrines, they had the..." Read more

"...It is a very quick read , being just under 300 pages, but it is a fresh, personal and sometimes amazing look at the birth of the U.S. Very different..." Read more

"...I found this to be a pretty quick page-turner . The only gripe I might have, is that the book ended rather abruptly -- at the end of 1776!" Read more

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‘1776’ Review: A Revolutionary Take on an Old Warhorse

By Bob Verini

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When the Tony-winning musical “1776” debuted on Broadway in 1969, it celebrated America’s ideals on the eve of its Bicentennial. Half a century later, a radical makeover brings critique front and center, while treating those ideals as a chimera rather than a promise fulfilled. The production’s pre-Broadway tryout at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., holds this truth to be self-evident: that the Declaration of Independence’s promises of freedom and justice were mere words, compromised and betrayed from the very moment of ratification.

Director Diane Paulus is no stranger to re-envisioning musical classics, having given new life to “Hair” and brought out the lessons in a circus-themed “Pippin.” Now she and choreographer/co-director Jeffrey L. Page go all-in on a political perspective, infusing librettist Peter Stone’s story of the Continental Congress with 20/20 hindsight. Never are we allowed to forget that the founders were self-interested fathers, heedless of women as thinking citizens and ready to consign people of color to history’s ashbin.

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A point of view is established right away, in Brechtian strokes. Against a front cloth projection of John Trumbull’s famous July 4 painting – which ended Peter Hunt’s original production – in saunters Crystal Lucas-Perry in white top and black slacks, impressive black braids down her back. She looks up skeptically at the historical fellows, then at us, and embarks on John Adams’ opening speech about Congress defined as “three or more useless men,” to knowing laughter. Before you can say “Sit Down, John,” an entire company of multiracial, multiethnic performers identifying as female, trans and non-binary is revealed. In slow motion and eerily front-lit, they don 18th century outerwear, pull up their stockings and shed sneakers for buckled shoes. Let the play begin!

Popular on Variety

This wide-open casting policy, to which “Hamilton” cracked open the door, is no stunt. Beyond offering prodigious talents some juicy roles traditionally closed to them (and inviting contemplation of other opportunities a boys’-club theater has jealously kept to itself), it instantly alienates us from any illusion that these characters are The Real Thing. Critics of “1776” have always argued that its efforts at realism are silly anyhow, with all the warbling and prancing going on. By setting aside verisimilitude, the production is freed up to contextualize the Continental Congress’s machinations through their consequences over the ensuing 200 years.

Thus, as Adams (Lucas-Perry), Jefferson (Elizabeth A. Davis) and Franklin (Patrena Murray) sing about “The Egg” of a new nation ripe for hatching, projected behind them is a collage of images of American activism from abolition to women’s suffrage to ACT-UP. Against that optimism, Southern delegate Edward Rutledge (Sara Porkalob) leads the coruscating indictment of the Triangle Trade, “Molasses to Rum,” in a full-stage evocation of a slave auction through group chorale and dance. Similarly, the Courier’s (Salome Smith) battlefield ballad “Momma, Look Sharp” is acted out by the ensemble in black shrouds, bringing out the universality of war’s scourges.

With the characters played as types, mere simulacra of historical figures who direct arguments out to – and often deliberately rev up – the audience, you have to figure something about the original material is going to get short shrift, and so it does: the simple, suspenseful pleasure of discovering how independence was won against all obstacles. Emphasizing the stakes for 21st century Americans lowers them precipitously for those living in the 18th; you just don’t feel the urgency or the frustration of patriots attempting to find common ground before Washington is defeated and all involved dangle at the end of British ropes.

That loss of narrative drive aside, there’s much pleasure to be had alongside the food for thought. Notable is the treatment of Sherman Edwards’s music and lyrics, which get unusual instrumentation (harpsichord coexisting with guitar, for instance, in John Clancy’s orchestrations), rhythm changes from 4/4 to waltz time, and spine-tingling choral work credited to AnnMarie Milazzo (who must have had a field day with the wide vocal ranges available to her, as opposed to the usual ho-hum tenors and baritones).

This is also the dancing-est “1776” ever, with even old Ben Franklin forgoing gouty leg for a soft-shoe. Some oddness is admitted, like an opening number reminiscent of “La Vie Boheme” from “Rent,” complete with seated choreography and John and Abigail Adams (Allison Kaye Daniel) dancing on the table. Delivering “He Plays the Violin,” a surly Martha Jefferson (Eryn LeCroy) shoves an elbow in our ribs so we get it’s not Tom’s bow she’s bragging about; writhing orgasmically, she’s more Molly Bloom than Molly Pitcher. As for the gesture the conservatives employ on “We never, ever go off half cocked,” the less said the better.

Still, the talent is there, and the audacious production concept – approved, we are pointedly told, by the Stone and Edwards estates – is never complacent. We need more theater that challenges, defiantly. This “1776” will move later this year to the American Airlines Theatre, the Broadway venue operated by the show’s New York co-producer Roundabout Theater Company, and subsequently go on tour. It will ruffle more than a few eagle feathers wherever it lands.

American Repertory Theater, Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, Mass., 550 seats, $110 top. Opened, reviewed June 2, 2022; runs through July 24. Running time: 2 HOURS 45 MINS.

• Production: A presentation by American Repertory Theater and Roundabout Theatre Company of a musical in two acts written by Peter Stone, based on a concept by Sherman Edwards and music and lyrics by Edwards.
• Crew: Directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus. Choreography, Page; sets, Scott Pask; costumes, Emilio Sosa; lighting, Jen Schriever; sound, Jonathan Deans; projections, David Bengali; music supervisor, David Chase; orchestrations, John Clancy; vocal design, AnnMarie Milazzo; music director, Ryan Cantwell; production stage manager, Alfredo Macias.
• Cast: Crystal Lucas-Perry, Patrena Murray, Elizabeth A. Davis, Liz Mikel, Joanna Glushak, Sara Porkalob, Allison Kaye Daniel, Eryn LeCroy, Gisela Adisa, Nancy Anderson, Becca Ayers, Tiffany Barbour, Allison Briner Dardenne, Mehry Eslaminia, Shawna Hamic, Oneika Phillips, Lulu Picart, Sushma Saha, Ariella Serur, Brooke Simpson, Salome Smith, Sav Souza, Grace Stockdale, Jill Vallery, Rose Van Dyne, Sabrina K. Victor, Imani Pearl Williams.

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The 1776 Project

The Broadway revival of the musical means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back to it.

“F ew historic incidents seem more unlikely to spawn a Broadway musical than that solemn moment in the history of mankind, the signing of the Declaration of Independence,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times in 1969. The United States was coming unglued. Yet the critic, an acerbic Englishman, felt his heart set aflutter by Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s 1776 . The musical had “captured the Spirit of ’76,” Barnes enthused. The editors headlined his rave “Founding Fathers’ Tale Is a Happy Musical.”

Earlier this month, as the United States was once again coming unglued, the splashiest, most provocative of many revivals of 1776 opened on Broadway . A co-production of the American Repertory Theater and the Roundabout Theatre Company, this new 1776 means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back—or even down—to it. These days, many Americans are a good deal less sure that happiness of any sort can be wrested from the pursuits of Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Framers. And so, in this latest production, the key has changed from major to minor.

F or more than five decades, 1776 has set the history wars to music and danced them backwards, in high-button shoes. There’s a good chance you’ve seen some version of it, most likely the 1972 feature film . It was a family hit; advance ticket sales at Radio City Music Hall were the largest in the venue’s history. Maybe your high school staged it , with white tube socks pulled over fraying corduroys.

But in case you’ve inexplicably missed this goofy cultural touchstone, a quick synopsis: The show dramatizes the deliberations of the Second Continental Congress in the spring of 1776. Most of the action is set in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. The cast consists of 20 members of Congress spread across 13 delegations, along with several functionaries and two delegates’ wives. (Abigail Adams appears via letters, and Martha Jefferson visits Philadelphia to, um, inspire her husband, who is suffering from writer’s block.) The action begins May 8 and concludes July 4.

Eliot A. Cohen: Go read the Declaration of Independence

The original 1776 was, in a broad sense, a bicentennial creation, of a piece with the tall ships and Schoolhouse Rock . The nation’s big birthday was already in the zeitgeist, to a far greater degree than our upcoming 250th, in 2026, is today. But more directly, 1776 responded to the upheavals of the ’60s. The show began casting shortly after heated anti-war protests were met with lethal police response at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago. The Weathermen called for “Days of Rage.” Stone and Edwards wanted days of hope, and promised that 1776 offered “laughter, poignancy and, above all, a kindling of pride and inspiration.”

That may sound dewy, and even fake, but 1969’s 1776 was not an altar. The creators were committed to fact, and to evidence. Edwards had been, albeit more briefly than he let on, a history teacher. It mattered to him and Stone that the show be accurate in ways that count, even if they fudged for dramatic effect superficial details, like Martha Jefferson’s congressional booty call. Edwards read the Journals of the Continental Congress and the letters of its delegates, which was much harder to do then than it is now. In the printed libretto, which went through two trade editions, the creators acknowledged debts to five different archives. In 2017, fact-checkers at Harvard’s Declaration Resources Project assayed their truth claims and pronounced them generally sound. As Stone and Edwards made clear (quoting a friend), they meant to counter any assumption that the Founders were divine: “ God writes lousy theater .”

From the very first musical number, the rollicking “ Sit Down, John ,” 1776 features flesh-and-blood mortals, flawed and often funny. John Adams of Massachusetts has the right diagnosis of the colonies’ predicament, and the wrong temperament to persuade his peers to independence. He is, as everyone in the cast agrees, “obnoxious and disliked.” If Adams is arrogant and thin-skinned, Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins is a rummy, and Benjamin Franklin a gouty lech—each, demonstrably, as in life. But crucially, those flaws with the greatest dramatic impact are not venal but mortal and even structural. Slavery is not only present but integral to the plot. Debate over the paragraph in Jefferson’s draft condemning the transatlantic slave trade as “cruel war against human nature itself” likely occupies more dramatic and moral real estate in the play 1776 than it appears to have done in the year 1776.

But if 1969’s 1776 “wasn’t reverential,” as Edwards said, neither was it glibly judgmental. Philosophically, the text, like small- r -republican politics itself, is pragmatist. Franklin stood at the show’s ethical center, the essential foil to Adams’s intransigent, ineffective perfectionism. When Adams accuses Franklin of being soft on slavery, the elder statesman who had been, in life, both an enslaver and a founder of the colonies’ first antislavery society, responds with a paean to union. The southern delegates, Franklin says, “no matter how much we disagree with them, are not ribbon clerks to be ordered about; they’re proud, accomplished men, the cream of their colonies”: no mere basket of deplorables. What’s more, “they and the people they represent will be a part of the new country you hope to create! Either start learning to live with them or pack up and go home.” For Franklin, the crux of the matter is achieving our country. “Independence! America!” he thunders. “For if we don’t secure that, what difference will the rest make?”

Spoiler alert: Independence is secured. “A republic … if you can keep it,” as Franklin later said . (The jury is still out.) When the curtain fell on the original production, with the actors striking the pose of Robert Edge Pine’s 1788 painting, Congress Voting the Declaration of Independence , audiences were prompted to cheer the achievement all the louder for knowing how brutally it was gained. They were called, too, to recognize the fragility of the American experiment, and the origin story we the people began to fight about before the Declaration’s ink was dry. The show’s second-corniest number, “ The Egg ,” makes the new nation a vulnerable hatchling: “The eagle inside / Belongs to us!” The production’s logo , in that vexed year of 1969, featured a cockeyed eaglet holding a Betsy Ross flag in its beak, a pose that appears one part surrender.

C live Barnes predicted that 1776 would prove “the sleeper of the season.” He underestimated its popularity by several orders of magnitude. The play was a sensation on the level of Hamilton , maybe more so. Its Broadway run lasted three years, and the production toured widely. Groups across the political spectrum, from the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion to New Left activists, claimed it as their own. The undersecretary of the Navy wanted to stage it for the troops in Vietnam. The San Francisco touring company of Hair went as a group to see 1776 ; at the stage door, the actors playing hippies sang “America the Beautiful” to the actors playing Founders. Towns and cities, red and blue, made special proclamations about the musical. It won three Tony Awards, including Best Musical, beating out the epoch-defining Hair .

The musicologist Elissa Harbert, who has done splendid work documenting the ’70s 1776 phenomenon , links the show’s impact to its banality: a “mirror-like quality” that allowed diverse audiences to spy whatever truths they held self-evident. That’s too cynical by half. A critic for the Berkeley Daily Gazette came closer to the moral complexity of the play in his 1970 review:

If you live in America today, you should see it. If you are old, it will tell you why young people are rioting in the streets. If you are young, it will tell you what the old are treasuring and trying to preserve … If you are black, it may help you to understand how a nation conceived in liberty could condone slavery. Above all, if you are human it may help you to conceive a compassion for great men giving birth to great schemes.

Compassion : Imagine that.

Because 1776 proved unifying at a moment of fracture, politicians tried to wrap themselves in its Betsy Ross flag. On George Washington’s birthday in 1970, the cast performed the musical in the East Room of the White House. Behind the scenes, members of President Richard Nixon’s staff had asked to cut three of the show’s scant 13 musical numbers: the haunting “ Momma, Look Sharp ,” for its anti-war message; the scorching “ Molasses to Rum ,” for its frankness about slavery; and the stinging “ Cool, Cool, Considerate Men ,” for its critique of the monied classes. But Sherman and Edwards insisted 1776 be performed intact or not at all. It went forward, all two hours and 45 minutes’ worth, with the president grinning his tricky grin.

The performers, New Lefties all, likewise declined to weaponize their work, despite strong personal convictions about the momentous issues of the day. Howard da Silva, Franklin in the original cast, had been blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer by the House Un-American Activities Committee, for which he blamed Nixon, then a representative on the committee. Da Silva joined an anti–Vietnam War demonstration on Pennsylvania Avenue the morning after the performance. But he gave that vehemence scant place in his art. “Just think … of being able to sign the Declaration of Independence in the White House,” he told the reporter covering the event for the women’s page of the Washington Evening Star .

F ast-forward half a century. In May 2019, theater websites reported that Diane Paulus, the artistic director of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater (ART) and a noted Broadway hitmaker, would mount a revival of 1776 , to open the following spring in Cambridge. Paulus didn’t know the musical well, but she told me she’d heard it was beloved as a patriotic artifact, something to watch with the kids on the Fourth. Sensing space to probe its tensions more deeply, she planned to foreground what she saw as the latent critique of racism in the original production.

The estates of Edwards and Stone control the rights to 1776 tightly. The book must be performed intact, as it was for Nixon. They authorized one key amendment, a quotation from Abigail Adams’s famed March 1776 “remember the ladies” letter , which might easily have fit the spirit of the original, had it launched just a bit later than 1969. But in general, the text is fixed; the director would have a free hand only with casting and staging.

I teach an undergraduate course on the American Revolution at Harvard, HIST 1776, and arranged for some of my students to fulfill their civically engaged capstone requirement by working as consultants to the ART production in the fall of 2019. While prepping for the class, I first saw the show, in a table read, that August 16—two days, as it happened, before The New York Times Magazine published the 1619 Project as a special issue.

Conor Friedersdorf: 1776 honors America’s diversity in a way 1619 does not

I’d heard rumors that Paulus’s 1776 would feature a cast without men: Founders, but not fathers. It sounded gimmicky. But when the actors walked into the workshop space that summer afternoon, the gimmick walloped me in the gut. This Congress was female, trans, and nonbinary; Black, brown, and white. The actors were writing “ our declaration, ” as my colleague Danielle Allen puts it: theirs and yours and mine. I burst into tears. The person sitting next to me, a famous feminist playwright, also sobbed.

Queued outside the restroom at intermission, we shared why we had cried. I said I’d been moved to hear this chorus of voices, from people unimaginable to the men they portrayed, raised in a hymn of complex praise for our beautiful and difficult country. She said her tears expressed longing for a world with no countries at all, like in John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

I realized we might be in trouble.

My students were proud of their work for the production that fall. One of the 1776 apprentices, an athlete who planned to join the Navy after graduation, imagined the circles of impact her research would have as the production toured the barely-United States during the presidential-election season.

The class was slated to see the show in May 2020. But by then, the students had been sent packing. Schools shuttered. Theaters went dark. The eggshell republic cracked further, wedged apart by masks and mandates, and by a president whose favorite Founder is Andrew Jackson . On May 25, George Floyd was brutally murdered on camera in Minneapolis. Millions of Americans took to the streets in rage and agony, protesting the still-lingering afterlife of slavery in the land of liberty, the paradox that had forced the nation’s first great and terrible compromise.

Read: How will we remember the protests?

The uprisings fundamentally changed Paulus’s plans for 1776 . The company dug more deeply into readings that included the 1619 Project and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning . Paulus made the show’s choreographer, Jeffrey Page , her co-director. Together, they made transformative choices, embracing a Brechtian approach that eschewed illusionistic details, including the famous closing fade to the painting of the signers. When it opened, at long last, this 1776 would take place firmly in the now.

I have thought a lot, in the context of this earnest, imperfect musical, about the differences between our moment and 1969, year of wounds, when the dream of the ’60s curdled into Manson and Altamont. When Americans, still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, lurched through the Tet Offensive that escalated their war abroad, and the bombings and protests that brought the war home, as the Weathermen had urged. I comfort myself with the claim—mostly true—that the late ’60s and early ’70s were more perilous, more violent, more fractured than our angrily Roaring ’20s.

Yet we have become, far more than our parents and grandparents, a people as morally confident as we are polarized. On the right, this conviction often expresses as uncritical worship for the founding era—history contorted to cudgel a decadent cultural left. On the left, moral certainty begets condescension to the generations who lived before us, as to those who voted against us. These are but subvariants of the same debilitating virus. As the historian Robert Tracy McKenzie asks in his fascinating recent book, We the Fallen People : “Is part of the problem of American democracy that we Americans think too highly of ourselves?”

Where the sensibility that defined 1969’s 1776 was Franklin’s pragmatic unionism, the stance that dominates in the Paulus-Page revival is Adams’s unyielding righteousness, a tragic flaw turned core virtue. As in 1969, there are no gods onstage. But now there are plenty of monsters, especially South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge, played by Sara Porkalob as a sneering Simon Legree. As Porkalob leads the cast in “Molasses to Rum”—the number’s length now expanded by 50 percent—curtains part to reveal, behind the proscenium arch, stacks of rum barrels looming over Independence Hall. By the end, the barrels stand 10 or 12 high, spanning the crossover space, stretching to the rafters—foul skyscrapers dwarfing Independence Hall. The delegates’ signatures are projected onto the barrels, as if showcasing the tentacular reach of slavery through every one of the newly United States.

In 1969’s 1776 , moral philosophy was destiny. Once uttered, “these truths,” however incomplete, lit a beacon for the future. For the world.

In 2022’s 1776 , political economy calls the shots. Instead of a promissory note for human equality, the Framers sign a deal with the devil. The stain of slavery upon a land of liberty, which enslaved people bravely decried in petitions in the 1770s , and which Edwards and Stone dramatized in 1969, becomes, in 2022, the sum and substance of American history.

Read: Americans didn’t always worship the Founding Fathers

Today, the gods sit in the audience: We who would, “against greater odds than a more generous God would have allowed,” as Franklin says, presumably have done better. The revival’s iconography calls us to be yet more adamant Adamses. The American flag—today’s 50-star version, on a stout metal pole—is clutched not in an eaglet’s tremulous beak but in a revolutionary fist: a war club. A flag meant to fly over the independent republic of the Acela Corridor.

I’ve seen the Paulus-Page 1776 four times now. I’ve cried at every performance for the magic of sitting in a room in the dark with other Americans, listening to our history’s jarring dissonances and soaring harmonies, imagining the music we might yet write, together.

The new Broadway production, at the American Airlines Theater, is more seasoned than the run in Cambridge. Jokes land better. The blocking is tighter, and some performances stronger. The regendering gesture gets an added kick from the fact that Elizabeth A. Davis , playing Jefferson, is visibly pregnant, a “congressional incubator,” as she sings.

The New York audience seemed appreciative, yet also divided. Younger patrons—not so many in attendance—cheered Adams, the self-professed “ag-i-ta-tor,” as if encouraging him never, ever to give an inch. Much of the crowd rooted for Franklin, and for the flag. An elderly man sitting next to me sang the whole show under his breath: a superfan, a patriot. Neither the moment nor the somber production portends the outpouring of reflective patriotism that greeted 1969’s 1776 .

“I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say, ‘Oh, 1776 ! It’s my favorite musical. It’s just what our country needs!’” Paulus told Jennifer Schuessler of the Times . Paulus cares about what the country needs: Her production’s stated goal is “an honest reckoning with our past” that can “help us move forward together.” But how the revival moves us forward remains unclear. It shouts. It shames. A content warning suggests it may trigger and traumatize. But what does it ask of “us!” to whom the eagle inside belongs?

There is plenty of work to do. Polls suggest that fewer than a third of Americans born after 1980 consider it essential to self-govern, rather than to be ruled by the military or a “strong leader.” In order to believe in American constitutional democracy, young people need knowledge of the foundation upon which our peoplehood was built, knowledge we the people manifestly do not possess. History results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are dismal and falling. And more than 30 states have lately introduced or passed laws impeding the teaching of American history, especially the histories of race or gender.

We also need knowledge of one another: about what moves our hearts and blows our minds. About what we wish for the future and carry from the past. Yet during the 2020 presidential election, some 40 percent of respondents told the Pew Research Center they “knew no one at all who supported the other candidate.” No wonder talk of “civil war” has since entered the social-media mainstream.

If we are to safeguard the flame of the Declaration, we will need to find space in our warring visions of the great and the good for curiosity and even modesty. Edwards and Stone knew this. Hamilton said as much, in “ Federalist No. 6 ,” way back in 1787: “Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?” For all our wokeness, we have yet to shake off that deceitful dream, to realize that all ages are brass. Brass, too, holds a luster; our job is to burnish that hearty alloy as best we can.

Is there room, even now, for hope? After the matinee of 1776 in New York, Crystal Lucas-Perry , who played John Adams, paused at the stage door to sign playbills for two young fans, little Black girls in braids. One wore a purple 1776 -branded sweatshirt, big enough to scrape the ground. But she will grow into it, as we might still grow into the promise of this country.

About the Author

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

David McCullough (1933–2022) twice received the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams , and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback . His other acclaimed books include The Johnstown Flood , The Great Bridge , Brave Companions , 1776 , The Greater Journey , The American Spirit , The Wright Brothers , and The Pioneers . He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Visit DavidMcCullough.com.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 4, 2006)
• Length: 400 pages
• ISBN13: 9780743226721
• Lexile ® 1300L The Lexile reading levels have been certified by the Lexile developer, MetaMetrics®

Browse Related Books

• Lexile ® 1291 - 1390
• History > United States > General
• History > United States > Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
• Biography & Autobiography > Military

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Raves and Reviews

"A stirring and timely work." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant . . . powerful . . . 1776 is vintage McCullough: colorful, eloquent and illuminating." -- Newsweek

"Should be required reading in living rooms from coast to coast." -- Dorman T. Shindler, The Denver Post

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