On the night of March 5, 1770—251 years ago tonight—a party of British soldiers shot and killed five Bostonians in an event known ever since as the Boston Massacre. The killings shook the loyalty of Britain’s North American colonists to the British government. John Adams wrote that the “foundation of American independence was laid” that […]
As teachers get ready for the fall, thousands will be tempted to make use of the 1619 Project curriculum offered online by the Pulitzer Center, which has formed a partnership with the New York Times to distribute lesson plans built around the essays in the 1619 Project, which were originally published in the New York […]
The New York Times is engaged in a full-scale assault on the memory of the American Revolution, alleging—without foundation and over the objections of some of the country’s leading historians—that the aim of the Revolution was to perpetuate slavery. This is a central thesis of the “1619 Project,” an interpretation of American history as an […]
This essay was published in the spring of 2019, when demands for the removal of memorials to leading figures of the American Revolution was just beginning to pick up steam. It attributes the movement to the pernicious influence of the late radical historian Howard Zinn, from whose books many of the young Americans determined to […]
The American Revolution was shaped by high principles and low ones, by imperial politics, dynastic rivalries, ambition, greed, personal loyalties, patriotism, demographic growth, social and economic changes, cultural developments, British intransigence, and American anxieties. It was shaped by conflicting interests between Britain and America, between regions within America, between families and between individuals. It was […]