In some ways, the Colonies had endured a slow political boil since the Stamp Act of 1765. And with the 1774 Coercive Acts, there came the tipping point. Passions flared, and rebellion ignited. Thus, historian and Pulitzer Prize winning writer David McCullough begins “1776” with a January 14 quote by Gen. George Washington: “Few people…

Commentary There are many moments in American history that have been significant because they have informed the principles of America’s traditional ideology of liberalism, but none as important as the present period since America’s founding. The United States is at a “1776 moment” of ideological transformation. The American Revolution of 1776 was a change of…

Commentary Now that everyone with a computer and an opinion has had his or her say on the merits and shortcomings of the “1619 Project,” we are now in a position to step back and ask ourselves: What is really at stake here? The most controversial aspect of the project has not been its content—apart…

Commentary After winning the independence they had declared in 1776, Americans had to prove that they could sustain self-government in peace. They’d governed themselves already, as colonists, but now the British government no longer protected them from the other European powers, and indeed remained a potential enemy of the new country. It’s easy for us…

“We are,” John Adams wrote to a friend early in June 1776, “in the very midst of a Revolution, the most compleat, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the History of Nations.” Adams was right, but it took prescience to discern it at that moment. In the aftermath of the costly British victory at Bunker…