The University of Edinburgh and the United States at 250 (part two)

It might come as a comfort to know that we’ve been here before. The historian Michael Hattem has recently shown that the preparations for the celebration of the bicentennial in 1976 were characterized by partisanship, infighting, and confusion over messaging. Multiple agencies, public and private, as well as corporations, often with competing or contradictory aims, sought to lead (and profit from) the national and local efforts to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Hattem reminds us that while ours is an age of intense conflict at home and abroad, so too were the early 1970s. Racial strife, student unrest, Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the American defeat in Vietnam provided the important context for the rather chaotic planning for the bicentennial. There are more than a few echoes of 1976 in 2026.  

While there are some similarities between our own time and the early 1970s, there are, where the American Revolution is concerned, telling differences as well. Hattem shows that conservatives, conscious of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and Marxism, embraced a patriotic interpretation of the Revolution in the 1970s ignoring or downplaying internal divisions within the rebellious colonies-cum-states. On the left, by contrast, historically marginalized groups in the United States emphasized their contributions to the American Revolution, challenging the perceived whiteness of the dominant narrative while calling attention to contemporary inequality and injustice  What is striking is that, in 1976, both the Left and the Right felt that they had a stake in the American Revolution. Five decades later that no longer seems to be the case. 

Since the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and advent of the War on Terror, and the rise of new technologies, including potent social media platforms, the American Revolution seems to have become a casualty in the (seemingly) endless 'culture wars' that are now a common feature of American life and politics: today the Right has co-opted a simplistic version of the Revolution, which is much less sophisticated than it was during the bicentennial, and the Left has largely abandoned the Revolution altogether. 

Consider The 1619 Project, an initiative conceived and edited by the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and published by the New York Times Magazine in August 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in British America. Hannah-Jones sought to center the African experience in American history. In an introductory essay she paid particular attention to the American Revolution and its origins to argue that the true founding of the country should be 1619 not 1776. Hannah-Jones argued that protecting slavery was one of the main motivations for some white Americans to declare independence from Britain in 1776. Gesturing toward Dunmore’s Proclamation (which offered freedom to enslaved persons in Virginia who fled from rebel masters to fight for the British), she wrote that ‘Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.’  

Hannah-Jones’s argument engendered significant discussion within universities, the media, and beyond.  Her achievement—and this point seems to have been missed by many of her critics—was not whether her argument was original or not, but that she reached a huge audience in making it. She synthesized a rich body of existing scholarship for a general audience. In so doing she helped to refocus the public debate over the Revolution and its legacy. The 1619 Project confirmed and accelerated the rejection of the American Revolution on the part of many on the American Left, a rejection that had been underway for a generation.  

Meanwhile, on the Right the Revolution has been appropriated for partisan ends. In September 2020 President Donald J. Trump convened a '1776 Commission' partially in response to the 1619 Project, but also to the widespread protests after the murder of George Floyd in May of that year. In announcing the creation of the commission, which included no professional historians, Trump claimed that the unrest was caused by poor history education in American schools. 'Left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools,' Trump said at the National Archives as he launched the commission. Two months earlier, Trump had given a Fourth of July address at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota which anticipated the findings of the 1776 commission. 'Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,' Trump declared. He continued, 'Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.'  

According to Trump, those who sought to topple 'the heroes of 1776' were enemies of real Americans. 'Their goal is not a better America,' he declared, 'their goal is the end of America.' Trump called on his supporters to defend the Founding Fathers: 'We will never let them rip America’s heroes from our monuments, or from our hearts. By tearing down Washington and Jefferson, these radicals would tear down the very heritage for which men gave their lives …' When the commission issued its report in January 2021 it called for 'patriotic education,' focused on the American Revolution, to counter the radical anti-American version of the nation’s history allegedly promulgated in U.S. schools. At the beginning of his second administration President Trump issued an executive order on January 29, 2025 reviving the '1776 Commission' (which had been abolished by President Joe Biden).  'The purpose of the 1776 Commission is to promote patriotic education,' Trump declared, 'as well as to advise and promote the work of the White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday ('Task Force 250') and the United States Semiquincentennial Commission in their efforts to provide a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion of the 250th anniversary of American Independence on July 4, 2026.'  

The appropriation of the Revolution for partisan ends, and its reconfiguration along simplistic lines by those on the Right that ignores much of the scholarship on the subject, has only accelerated its rejection by the Left. Two broad camps have emerged, summed up by the dates 1619 and 1776:  one that is critical of the founding of the United States and skeptical about the motives and ideological claims of the revolutionaries; and another that diminishes or ignores the revolutionaries’ faults and seeks to promote a triumphalist, celebratory account of the nation’s founding. Neither the 1619 Project nor the 1776 Commission caused the broader divergence between Left and Right over the Revolution. Rather they should be seen as expressions of tendencies that have developed and become increasingly pronounced since the end of the Cold War. They are evidence of the vast gulf between Left and Right over the meaning of the American Revolution. This gulf is different from what we saw in 1976. 

Continue to Part Three