u/dhowlett1692

>When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…

In 1776, these words began the creation of a new nation. 250 years later, what does it mean to reread the Declaration of Independence and live in the nation that it spurred? Perhaps you see the 4^(th) of July and this milestone anniversary as an opportunity to share your patriotism by wearing red, white, and blue; waving the flag at a parade and watching a fireworks display. Maybe you’d rather utilize your First Amendment right to criticize the nation for its political, social, and moral shortcomings, both historical and present day.  Whether you feel joy, disinterest, glee, frustration, or any mix of emotion, you’re reacting to history, and that’s exactly what historians do all the time.

This contest over historical meaning is one we’ve discussed multiple times here on AskHistorians.  Last March, we shared a MegaThread related to the executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and u/commiespaceinvader wrote an excellent Methods post on history and the nationalist agenda.  Critics of historical scholarship often cry “revisionist” at works that highlight underrepresented groups or reshape narratives in ways that challenge and complicate national heroes.  These claims seek to preserve the past without forcing one to negotiate the complexities of history.  On the U.S. 250^(th), your idea of the national image, both from the U.S. and from abroad, is tethered to a historical process.

Your thoughts on today’s 4^(th) of July holiday and 250^(th) celebration are part of the contested meaning in our shared past. One of the most common ways that historians approach the American Revolution is by asking “How revolutionary was it?” If you see success, you might point to the language of liberty, the expansion of political power to non-elites, and the Bill of Rights. If you see failure, you might point to the expansion of slavery and genocide into western territories, women’s exclusion from politics, and Frederick Douglas’ “What to the Slave Is the 4^(th) of July?” If you appreciate the ideals but critique the execution, you might see the Founders as enslavers and generations of abolitionist work result in the 13^(th), 14^(th), and 15^(th) Amendments in a Second Founding.  Or you might see a representative democracy in a multi-racial country as a near impossibility with Executive Order 9066 and The Johnson-Reed Act woven into its history. 

Today’s celebrations specifically honor the Declaration of Independence, but the founding documents are in flux as we challenge ourselves to find the best way to tell the American story.  For decades, if you visited the National Archives in Washington D.C., the rotunda display of the founding documents included the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, but in recent years the former Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan announced the additions of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 19th Amendment.  The Founding of the U.S. is not a stagnant idea left in 1776, but possibly one of a series of historical processes not yet agreed upon.

How revolutionary was it? Early American scholarship is bound up by a spectrum of answers.  Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom centers the paradox of slave-holders espousing the language of freedom while Gordon Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution makes the case that the expansion of political rights, even if to near-exclusively white men, was a radical event in the 18^(th) century. Woody Holton’s Forced Founders considers how Virginia elites sought freedom to preserve the social order of their plantation colony.  These are also cases limited to the revolutionary spirit within the U.S., but you might also ask about the legacy of the American Revolution by looking outside of the borders to see how it inspired other nations in the work of Caitlin Fitz’ Our Sister Republics or David Armitage’s The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.  The events of the past do not change, but the choices by historians to include primary sources that represent different people, to weave in new places, and to reframe narratives.

So, what is today’s 250^(th) celebration? Another day where the history of the American Revolution takes on new meaning. Now we ask ourselves in 2026, have we fulfilled or squandered the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Are we on track to enshrine it in our national culture or have we cast it aside? For historians, as we reconsider the American Revolution yet again, what history do we tell? 

Here are a posts that might be of interest today, and we welcome historians to share histories of commemoration, early America, and contested memory as well.

AMAs:

• I'm a historian of the Declaration of Independence. AMA
• We are historians whose work studies race, rights, and justice in American democracy, Ask Us Anything about Confederate Monuments, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement & more!
• Hello--I am Timothy Breen, author of "American Revolution on Trial: A new Nation Confronts the Burden of Independence." Like my other books on the Revolution, it focuses on the experiences of ordinary people, especially during the run up to the Declaration of Independence.
• We're James Madison, George Mason, and experts from Colonial Williamsburg and Montpelier. Ask us anything about the origins of American Revolutionary rights!
• Ask Me Anything about Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s
• AMA: Founding Fanatics: Extremism and the Formation of American Democracy
• I'm John Garrison Marks, author of ***Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory*** (out April 7!). It tells the story of how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington's history with slavery over the past 250 years. AMA!
• Ever wonder how art can ignite revolution and reveal untold stories of the women and men enslaved and free who risked it all for love of liberty? I’m Dr. Zara Anishanslin and my new book "The Painter’s Fire" dives into all this and more. AMA about Am Rev art and history!
• Ever wonder about your ancestry? So did people in early America. I'm Dr. Karin Wulf and my new book _Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America_ publishes today! AMA about Genealogy and Family History in Vast Early America and why it matters.
• I'm Dr. Jim Ambuske, Historian of the American Revolution, AMA about the Stamp Act crisis and the coming of the War for Independence

Posts & Answers:

• How much of the American Revolutionary War is really King George's fault?
• Were British really the "bad guys" in American revolution?
• How radical was the American Revolution?
• Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while also owning hundreds of human beings, correct? Did he not see people of color as real people? Did his mind change on slavery as the years went by?
• Did Americans always see the Founding Father as infallible, or was that a later development? Either way, what brought it about?
• What do we know about how the parents of the respective Founding Fathers felt about their son’s revolutionary activities?
• Jefferson slavery view?
• Why is 1776 considered the start of the USA and not 1788/1789?
• The 1776 Commission says that it's wrong to call the Founding Fathers hypocrites or liars over the issue of slavery and their belief in principled rights. What was the contemporary response of this apparent hypocrisy at the time of the Declaration and the Constitution?
• New Jersey granted women and racial minorities the right to vote in it's 1776 constitution. The state took away this rights in 1807. How and why did this occur?

Link: There is a long history and structure of US migration and citizenship policy history. What is that history? I'm Anna Law here for an AMA about my new book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship.

Great to be here this morning with you all. A decision from the Supreme Court on whether Trump can alter the Constitution’s birthright citizenship provision by Executive Order is imminent this week. I’m Dr. Anna Law and my new book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a legal and policy history of US migration from the colonial period to 1888. I am a trained as a political scientist and also do very historical research on US migration and constitutional legal and policy history. <Cracks knuckles> AMA.

That is the arc of time is when the colonies, then the states, almost exclusively managed international and interstate migration until the federal government took over immigration controls after the Civil War. The contribution of the book is to bring together in one study US voluntary migration, African American, and Native American histories. These are academic literatures that are usually read in isolation of each other. I put them together because federal court cases in the 19^(th) century showed that the politicians and jurists of the period thought of voluntary European migration, enslaved forced migration, and the ability of Native people to stay on their ancestral lands as relational and zero sum. In the 1830s in the southeast for example, slave states goaded the federal government into violently deporting 80,000 Native Americans to clear the land for white families and the expansion of cotton growing and slavery.

The US government’s official story on migration is that there were functionally open borders until the federal government started enforcing immigration laws in the late 19^(th) century.  My book counters that ahistorical claim and presents the colonial, early republic, and antebellum migration and citizenship laws and how it was experienced by politically unwanted groups. One big reason why deportation and exclusion are not fully controlled by the federal government until 1888 is because of slavery. Slave states found the idea of a federal deportation power frightening because of the possibility that the US government could deport enslaved people. Thus, control over international and interstate migration was at the colonial and state level until the Civil War politically disentangled slavery from voluntary migration. So, the location of the dividing line between federal and state control over migration has always been politically determined.

To learn more about me, you can visit my website. To order Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, click the hyperlink. You can follow me on BlueSky at u/unlawfulentries.bsky.social If you really cannot get enough and need more inside-baseball discussion of US migration and citizenship history, listen to my recent 2 Complicated 4 History podcast and see its detailed show notes that include more sources about the topic.

Proof: Verified by AskHistorians moderators

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1srs7k6/hi_everyone_im_dr_ciruce_movahedilankarani_and_im/

>I'm very excited to be here to answer your questions on Iran, energy history, and the history of development while I talk about my new book, Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran, now out from Stanford University Press. I'm Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. For more info about me and links to my other publications, see my faculty webpage.

>For background, I'm a specialist in the history of modern Iran, with a primary focus on the intersection of technology, the environment, and development in the country’s recent past. In broad terms, I am interested in how even highly industrialized societies are entangled with nature, and I see energy infrastructures as crucial sites for understanding how human ambitions and natural limits have been negotiated. By focusing on Iran and the Global South, I aim to shed light on how modern energy- and resource-intensive ways of life were built and how they proliferated around the world.

>In Accelerant, I focus on natural gas in twentieth-century Iran, tracing its transformation from a waste product into a vital resource underpinning a self-consciously modernizing society. I study natural gas as a crucial enabler of industrializing development, a potent symbol within a highly charged politics of anticolonial modernization, and a promised but failed technofix to the growing challenge of air pollution in the country’s cities. With gas now accounting for some seventy percent of Iran’s total energy use, in Accelerant I argue that modern Iranian society has been fundamentally ordered around consumption of the fossil fuel.

>Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating thereafter, gas changed how Iranians heated their homes, fueled their vehicles, and cooked their food. Iranian leaders saw the resource as the key to building an independent and prosperous nation, a futuristic energy source for a future world power, and they promised a future of cheap and intensive energy consumption for all Iranians. At the same time, factories and power plants began to use the new fuel too, a policy decision driven by an official pursuit of rapid economic growth that was paired with deepening anxieties about the environmental violence that industrialization had begun to inflict. But despite their rhetorical exhortations of widespread gas use, in the uneven spread of piped gas across the country a great many Iranians saw their value as national subjects seemingly reflected in their energy infrastructure, and it was a sight that displeased many in their unequal positions.

>As I thus argue, natural gas utilization and the developmentalism that drove its embrace were substantially similar under both the prerevolutionary Pahlavi monarchy and postrevolutionary Islamic Republic, and I highlight how Iranians’ differing encounters with gas energy were an important catalyst for the sociopolitical tensions of a rapidly changing society. I moreover employ postwar Iranian developmentalism and its co-constitution with gas infrastructure as a lens to uncover the choices, aspirations, and natural realities from which fossil fuel dependency has arisen, arguing that anticolonial resource nationalism was a key, but largely overlooked, driver of increased resource use in the Global South and thus anthropogenic environmental change around the world.

>So, AMA! I'll be here all day, answering questions until about 5:00pm PDT.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sdxopr/im_john_garrison_marks_author_of_thy_will_be_done/

>Hi everyone, I'm a public historian, writer, and the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory, which comes out tomorrow (April 7)!. The book explores Americans' centuries-long struggle to reckon with George Washington's involvement in slavery. I trace how generations of Americans—abolitionists, educators, politicians, descendants of people enslaved by Washington, museum professionals, and countless others—have each remembered, forgotten, and distorted Washington's history with slavery, wielding it in the political and cultural fights of their day.

>The book provides an overview Washington's history with slavery, then explores how different eras made sense of Washington's status as both one of the nation's most prolific enslavers and the architect of one of its largest private emancipations. It looks at how that history was erased in the years after his death; what happened to the people Washington freed from slavery; how both proslavery and antislavery activists used it in their rhetoric; how both Black and White Americans marked Washington's 200th birthday in the 1930s; how Washington and slavery has been taught in American schools; and how museums and historic sites have evolved in their telling of this history.

>It reveals how Americans have always viewed the past through the lens of their present circumstances and offers important context for today's controversies about the public interpretation of the history of slavery in the lead-up to our 250th anniversary.

>So please, AMA about George Washington, slavery, and American public memory!

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1safr37/creating_an_informed_citizenry_in_the_early/

>Hello, everyone! I'm George Oberle a Librarian and Associate Prof. of History at George Mason University where I teach Historical Methods and American history. I'm here to talk about my book, Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (UVA Press). This book explores the impact of the early American "info wars," that emerged from debates between the founders over what kinds of institutions should be formed to educate the electorate and where intellectual authority should reside in a republic. Central to these discussions was the question of a national university championed by George Washington and others, which sparked a decades-long battle culminating in the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution.

>Here's the overview from my publisher's website:

>When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning, George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

>Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

>Please ask me anything about the book.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s7ptb7/i_am_dr_josephine_hoegaerts_here_to_talk_about/

>Hello r/AskHistorians, my name is Josephine Hoegaerts. I’m a professor of European Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and I have always been very interested in sound and people’s voices. (Being a life-long choir girl probably has something to do with this obsession). Why do we like some voices, and not others? How can we listen for hours to one beloved teacher or inspiring politician, but immediately switch off when another opens their mouth? And have we always sounded the way we do now?

>The last question was the one that, as a historian, fascinated me most, so about ten years ago I set out to study how people used their vocal apparatus in the past, how physicians and scientists started studying vocal health, what journalists and critics thought of the vocal performances they heard, and especially what people did when they thought there was something wrong with their voice. How did they treat hoarseness? How did they learn to sing higher, speak louder, or talk fluently?

>I learned a lot about the aspirations of speakers and singers, about the strict norms that ruled speech and conversation, and perhaps most of all about how people with speech impediments were treated by doctors, but also by society. (I recently published a book on these topics: Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting – Penn Press If you're interested in the book, feel free to use discount code PENN-JHOEGAERTS30)

>Spoiler alert: I never found out what people ‘really’ sounded like in the past, but I discovered many more interesting things in the process – including a wild range of sore throat remedies you should probably never try.

>I’ll be here from 11 am to 3 pm ET to answer all your questions about voices of the past, speech, speech impediments and sound history.