Just four months before the 2016 election upset the American political order, President Barack Obama authorized a Semiquincentennial Commission of thirty-seven senators, representatives, private citizens, and other political and judicial figures to plan the United States’ commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Organized under the umbrella of the America250 Foundation, patriotic and historical groups across the country (with the Semiquincentennial Commission at the helm) have since then been debating what the Revolution means, how it ought to be presented, and who should have a say in how we remember our national past.Footnote ¹

The effort has been controversial, both on account of the Semiquincentenntial Commission’s dysfunction and as a worrying exemplification of the warnings that scholars of American Revolution memory have been offering for two decades. The council has struggled to operate amicably, let alone agree on an interpretive framework or commemorative program. In 2022, four commission staffers sued the group for “cronyism, self-dealing, mismanagement of funds, potentially unlawful [and discriminatory] contracting practices, and wasteful spending” under the Trump-appointed chairman, Philadelphia businessman Daniel DiLella. According to these staffers—Renee Burchard, Kirsti Garlock, Anna Laymon, and Keri Potts—they “could no longer participate in noncompliant, unlawful and/or fraudulent use of taxpayer funds, and could no longer endure a toxic and volatile work environment.”Footnote ² In particular, they alleged that DiLella filled the ranks with underqualified patronage appointments, created a “boy’s club” environment, and paid women less for the same work. Their case was terminated after an independent investigation found no evidence of discrimination or retaliation.

Nonetheless, the lawsuit shook up the organization. Another commissioner, Philadelphia-based finance Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Andrew Hohns, publicly accused DiLella of making decisions unilaterally without consulting the twenty-four-member panel. In July 2022, President Joe Biden replaced DiLella with former Treasurer of the United States, Rosie Rios. Three months later, the CEO and president of the America250 Foundation, Joe Daniels, resigned. Not to be outdone in litigiousness, DiLella and commission executive director Frank Giordano, his close friend, sued both the discontented staffers and the disgruntled commissioners, accusing the former of malicious prosecution and the latter of defamation and civil conspiracy. These criticisms of their leadership, they argued, were nothing more than political efforts to remove and replace them. Federal courts dismissed the first suit and ruled that the commissioners were federal employees and, thus, could not be found liable for defamation.Footnote ³

It is hard to miss the irony of a purportedly nonpolitical patriotic memorialization organization devolving into such dysfunction that its leaders start suing one another. It is as if commemoration is political. By August 2024, however, Rios was making efforts to turn the page. In the interest of bipartisanship, she selected first couples Barack and Michelle Obama and George W. and Laura Bush to serve as honorary national co-chairs.Footnote ⁴

Then came Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024 and a redoubled Make America Great Again (MAGA) insurgency.

Trump hit the ground running. First, he sidelined the America250 Foundation approved by Congress and replaced it with a MAGA-infused public–private partnership housed entirely within the National Park Foundation. Trump’s new organization is called Freedom 250, a misnomer where truly democratic norms are concerned. High-profile donors are given access to the president and preferential treatment at commemorative events, though the specifics of these arrangements are nebulous. On top of that, Freedom 250—not America250—received two-thirds of the $150 million allocated to the Interior Department for commemoration in 2025. In part, these funds underwrote mobile history exhibits by the conservative media foundation and mouthpiece PragerU and a $250,000 disbursement to the group that planned the January 6 rally. Included in the mobile history exhibits are a fleet of six Freedom Trucks that travel across the country providing Americans with the opportunity to talk to the “founding fathers”—or at least artificial intelligence (AI) portraits of them. There is functionally no independent oversight as to how this money is being raised and how taxpayer funds are being spent.Footnote ⁵

But it is not just about the money. The administration is determined to produce a distorted, uncritical celebration of American greatness for the semiquincentennial. In essence, every celebration will have to comply with the stringent demands that the White House sent Smithsonian officials late last year, the very demands that forced the removal of informative panels detailing George Washington’s position as an enslaver. To quote the executive order directly, commemorations “restoring truth and sanity to American history” must never deviate from the uncomplicated fact that “the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world.”Footnote ⁶

To that effect, Trump signed an order establishing a taskforce to plan “a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion of the 250th anniversary of American independence” and declared a yearlong “Salute to America 250” that would conclude with a proposed “National Garden of American Heroes” memorializing 250 historic Americans. Trump has been talking about this garden since 2020. His effort to build the garden during his first term—announced amid the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, never advanced past an executive order, and cancelled by Biden for fear that it would politicize American history—prioritized icons and figures that could be confined to a conservative historical program. Martin Luther King Jr. made the cut, alongside the usual litany of founding fathers. So did President Ronald Reagan and fundamentalist-leaning minister Billy Graham.Footnote ⁷

In Trump’s second term, the administration set aside funding for the commemorative site. Trump’s team of crusaders canceled countless grants for the arts and appropriated $40 million of that funding to the U.S. Department of the Interior for the garden. Even with this budget, however, the planning has stagnated. News network CNN reported on April 19, 2026 that there may not be any statues by July, though West Potomac Park was recently designated as the preferred location for the garden.Footnote ⁸

The garden’s fluctuating fate is a fitting representation of the administration’s entire relationship with the Revolution and American history writ large. Republicans have made political hay of the promise to “restore truth and sanity to American history.” The proposed garden is already a means to that end. Calling for such a site pushed an idea of exceptional American heroism and showed conservative voters that their elected leaders meant business when they promised to take on the subversive interpretations of American history proffered by the left. The executive order is explicit in outlining what the administration considers subversive, namely a “divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” For them, “truth and sanity” requires “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing” without foregrounding the systems of oppression that made this “progress” necessary in the first place. It does not matter, then, if the garden continues to stagnate. It has already served its purpose as theater, allowing the administration to uncomplicate the American past and strip taxpayer funds from institutions and agencies that might challenge its views and policy initiatives.Footnote ⁹

But we ought not to be misled by the administration’s inability to follow through on many of its promises. Incomplete and superficial interpretations of the American past, especially when offered at the highest echelon of power, are still dangerous. The stakes are high. The current administration is attempting to tell a very specific story about our founding.

Its champions have been trying since Trump’s first term. After all, he tasked his 1776 Commission, a group of conservative partisans that did not include a single academic historian, with writing an acceptable outline of U.S. history. Their mission was, in their own words, to cultivate the “rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles” and to “show how the American people have ever pursued freedom and justice, which are the political conditions for living well.” According to their report, that pursuit of “freedom and justice” was an ideological throughline in American history that ran from the founders to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In advocating for civil rights for African Americans, the commission argued, all Dr. King sought to do was fulfill the original promises of the founders. It was the supporters of so-called “identity politics” and “progressivism” who subverted these principles by privileging specific identity groups over the whole polity. To quote the report, “The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders,” including “the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of ‘group rights.’” And who, one might ask, was the original culture warrior and protector of group rights? South Carolina populist John C. Calhoun, of course, the wild-haired maverick who stood in the vanguard of the United States’ first radicalized identity group: the enslaver. In one fell swoop, the 1776 Commission suggested that Dr. King exemplified their interpretation of the American past and castigated today’s culture warriors as descendants of slavery, fascism, and communism.Footnote ¹⁰

Trump and the Republicans are certainly not alone in leaning on our national origin story to score political points. Much of the Democratic Party’s campaign rhetoric in 2024 argued that Americans had to come together to defeat the threat that Trump posed to their founding traditions. In October 2024, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris—standing alongside former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger at the site where George Washington crossed the Delaware River—reminded her assembled audience that “the founders disagreed, often quite passionately.” It was through these debates that they “laid out the foundations of our democracy.” They constructed the “principles and traditions that have sustained our nation for over two centuries because generations of Americans, from all backgrounds, from all beliefs, have cherished them, upheld them, and defended them.” It was the duty of every American to sustain that fight for the nation’s foundational values, to continue making real the promises that set the country in motion.Footnote ¹¹

Joe Biden also turned to the words of the founders for legitimacy and political support. His 2024 Presidential May Day Address called attention to the fact that “the United States of America [was] based on an idea: We are all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.” His “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” primetime address two years earlier went even further. In twenty-two minutes, he drew an ideological line in the sand, articulated an alternative view on the United States’ origins, and condemned Trump. “We, the people,” he implored, “will not let anyone or anything tear us apart … we must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying [it].” For people who scarcely seem to agree on anything, Trump, Biden, and Harris believe wholeheartedly that they exemplify the true meaning of the American Revolution. They believe it so strongly that they are using the very same moment and the very same words to attack one another.Footnote ¹²

In fact, leaders across the political spectrum profess the same profound certainty surrounding our national origins and this august 250th anniversary—except, of course, that they disagree about its every aspect. Politicians call upon the Revolution to cloak radically oppositional ideological programs in patriotism. The founding documents, the founding spirit, and the founders themselves have become partisan tools to be exploited, abused, and discarded.

This worry that the founding has become nothing more than partisan jockeying and artificial pandering pervades recent scholarship on the memory and commemoration of the Revolution.

Indeed, it is not just that politics today is inundated with cherry-picked applications of the national past; that reality is broadly accepted and as old as the republic itself. Contemporary political actors’ insistence on restricting access to the Revolution—an event long understood to be a ubiquitous moment of Americanness, an identifiable origin point from which American society’s institutions developed—reveals a more pressing and more harrowing truth. The Revolution today still holds the symbolic cachet that formed radically disparate American colonies into a cohesive American people, a process that has been explored by numerous scholars going back to the 1950s.

Major scholarly texts from the first half of the twentieth century, including works by leading thinkers of twentieth-century American culture such as Richard Hofstadter, Gunnar Myrdal, and Merle Curti, upheld the founding tenets of the Revolution as a cornerstone of American national identity. Starting in the 1970s, a preeminent scholar of American memory, Michael Kammen, showed that the forces of mass culture and the patriotic nostalgia generated by World War II kept this cohesive foundational ethos alive well into the Cold War era. But doing so required an unfortunate compromise. To make the Revolution something that transcended political and cultural differences in the United States, Kammen’s subjects, namely historical novelists, cultural producers, and advertisers, “de-revolutionize[d] the American Revolution.” They presented it as a positive and nostalgic moment, a “season of youth” in the long history of American democracy.Footnote ¹³

Several scholars rightfully argue that this consensus-building began much earlier and has been thorny since the start. During the early republic, the lived memory of the Revolution and opportunity to interact directly with surviving veterans ensured that the conflict became a foundational component in the construction of American national identity. This process too was partisan, with Federalists and Democratic-Republicans alike jockeying to control the narrative and capitalize on the unrivaled electoral potential of the nation’s origin story. It was this ability to sustain a group as ideologically, regionally, and culturally disparate as the American people that made the Revolution such an effective political symbol.Footnote ¹⁴

That adaptability has its limits. As time progressed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, veterans died, and generational memories receded into the historic past, the weight and realness of the Revolution faded away, leaving behind the symbolic heft of a national origin story without any of its initial collective investment. Despite this, Americans’ commitment to the Revolution and their specific understanding of what it means has never wavered. Today, 250 years later, the popular perception of the nation’s founding is dominated by nebulous abstractions, heavily interpreted (if not sanitized) commemorations, and politically motivated soundbites that are exploited relentlessly by both political parties.

This discordance is untenable. Constituents of the right are so convinced they speak for the founders that they are poised to suppress and destroy all dissenting voices, an ironic subversion of the very freedom they claim to champion. Voices from the left, on the other hand, are committed to the positive-coded abstractions of the founding generation: freedom, liberty, and equality. They know that the founders never intended for the United States to experience such monumental reforms and, as a result, have largely abandoned the concept of original intent altogether. Neither approach is sustainable.

A group of contemporary historians, including Jill Lepore, Andrew M. Schocket, David Sehat, and Andrew Burstein, have been sounding the alarm for over a decade. Between 2010 and 2015—before Obama’s Semiquincentennial Commission, before either Trump presidency, before the 1776 Commission, before any mention of a conservative-tinted National Garden—these scholars all called attention to the reality of irreconcilably partisan national mythologies. They generally agreed that conservatives since the 1980s have consistently proffered in the most damaging and most ahistorical interpretation of the founding moment, although liberals and others on the left are by no means blameless. Though disparate causes and groups have been co-opting the founders and their Revolution for validation since the dawn of the republic, doctrinal partisanship in contemporary political discourse raised the stakes on how we remember our national past and turned the Revolution into a divisive, exclusionary litmus test to gauge ideological or, more aptly, electoral loyalty.

Schocket, Burstein, and Sehat identify two camps of Revolutionary memory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, each overlapping ideologically with one of the two major political parties. Schocket, for his part, employs oppositional terms—essentialism and organicism—to categorize how differing political persuasions reflected and sought to shape the memory of the Revolution in the twentieth century, whether in the oratory of elected officials, the scholarship of professional historians, popular culture, or historic sites. Essentialism, the term Schocket uses to describe the commemorative activities and ideological position of the political right, “relie[d] on the assumption that there was one American Revolution led by demigods, resulting in an inspired governmental structure and leaving a legacy from which straying would be treason.” Per this interpretation, the founders were fixed in time and bound by their written and oral record, which could be applied to but not modernized for contemporary issues.Footnote ¹⁵

For liberal-leaning organicists, on the other hand, “there are many pasts that share elements but no one fixed truth. Rather, the past must be interpreted to be understood.” For many people on the left, the Revolution cemented aspirational ideals of liberty and equality that could be expanded over time to accommodate populations and circumstances unforeseen by the founders. Simply put, according to Schocket, these two groups disagree as to the fallibility and flexibility of the founders and their stated ideals, with the right coming down on the side of a historical memory fixed in time and the left allowing for greater interpretive breadth in the modern era.Footnote ¹⁶

Although they do not adopt Schocket’s terms, David Sehat and Andrew Burstein broadly accept his categories. Sehat takes Schocket’s line of reasoning one step further to conclude that conservatives, liberals, and libertarians each constructed cohesive yet inaccurate versions of the founders squarely in alignment with their respective ideological positions. It is largely because of the weight given to the founders, he argues, that “discussions of policy become ideological combat. If you disagree, you betray principle.” Whereas libertarians mobilized the small government bona fides of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to oppose federal government in any form, conservatives wielded both the memory of the founders and the levers of federal power to enforce their understanding of traditional American values, among them religiosity, order, and national unity. All that paired with the liberals’ belief in democratic expression and individual sovereignty made the Revolution crucial ammunition in an ongoing battle between three seemingly irreconcilable ideological programs, ammunition that none of the combatants could afford to relinquish.Footnote ¹⁷

Andrew Burstein’s Thomas Jefferson is the preeminent example of this opportunistic, cross-ideological ammunition. Every person could (and did) claim their own Jefferson; this time-honored practice began in the early republic. In fact, it was Democrats and liberals who expressly sought to emulate Jefferson’s democratic philosophy from the 1930s to the 1990s, ultimately compelling them to rationalize the Sage of Monticello’s slaveholding and elitism as minor foibles in the life of a visionary theorist.

Of course, conservatives never vacated their claim to the Jeffersonian legacies of federalism and governmental responsibility. But by 2010, as Burstein argues, “it wasn’t enough [for conservatives] just to have a Jefferson who fought government spending in the manner of Ronald Reagan. Now, Jefferson had to embrace every value that the long excluded (as they dubbed themselves) were looking to bring back.” Within national politicking, critical thought regarding the founders has largely been replaced by symbolic invocations and celebratory platitudes selected to maximize an otherwise partisan message about any number of issues: taxation, gun control, reproductive rights, voting rights, and racial politics, to name but a few.Footnote ¹⁸

Jill Lepore tracks this instrumentalization of the Revolution to what was thought to be its extreme in 2010: the conservative Tea Party coalition that took hold of the Republican Party in response to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. As Lepore argues, members of that faction, including politicians Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan, conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, and the American citizens who voted them into office and tuned into their programs, were especially guilty of contorting the Revolution beyond reason to comply with their partisan agenda. These conservative Tea Partiers “subscribe[d] to a set of assumptions about the relationship between the past and the present stricter, even, than the strictest form of constitutional originalism, a set of assumptions that, conflating originalism, evangelicalism, and heritage tourism, amounts to a variety of fundamentalism.” By their logic, Obama and the Democrats were literally—not figuratively, not rhetorically—forsaking the founders.Footnote ¹⁹

As the true ideological inheritors of the founding generation, or so the Tea Partiers reasoned, their moral imperative was to obstruct and resist all other groups as traitorous to our foundational spirit. Fox News pundit Glenn Beck often led the charge. In 2010, he scrawled the word “progressivism” on a chalk board during his keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Committee. “Progressivism,” he opined to his audience, “is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution. And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To progress past the Constitution.” To follow his logic, the progressives helmed by then–Democratic president Barack Obama were slowly consuming the Constitution, methodically excising away the most important of American values. Even Beck’s fiction does not stray far from this theme. In The Overton Window, Beck’s political thriller based on a real concept in political theory, a previously apolitical ad man joins an extralegal group fittingly called the “Founders’ Keepers” in their mission to protect the United States from the Machiavellian plots of an elitist cabal determined to generate radical societal change. For Beck and others of his ilk, the left is not just wrong about the founders; they are the enemies of the founders and an affront to the republic they built.Footnote ²⁰

“Inflexible.” “Fundamentalism.” “Treason.” “Ideological combat.” These do not feel like the terms, the words, the phrases to describe a nation’s founding. For Burstein, Schocket, Lepore, and Sehat, however, no other descriptors would suffice. To say the least, they’ve departed significantly from Michael Kammen’s depiction of national commemoration in the post–World War II era as an “age of consensus and heritage by compulsion” that was “orderly, sanitized, seemingly innocent, and of course, fabulously unreal.” Today’s self-appointed champions of the founding fathers are holding on to the “sanitized” and the “seemingly innocent.” But the “age of consensus” is long gone. These four scholars would in fact argue that such a cohesive “consensus” never existed in the first place, given how easily political parties, interest groups, and social movements have co-opted the language of the Revolution throughout American history. Everyone—whether Whigs, Democrats, or Republicans, abolitionists or enslavers, segregationists or civil rights activists, suffragettes, supply-siders, or New Dealers—can wrap themselves in some small part of the Revolution. They just leave all the other parts to somebody else.Footnote ²¹

Historian Michael D. Hattem thinks the situation is getting even worse, just in time for the semiquincentennial. In conducting the research for his primer on the memory of the Revolution throughout American history, Hattem concludes that discordance about the United States’ national origins becomes “more vehement and consequential” during periods marked by political partisanship, economic unrest, large-scale social movements, perceived increases in immigration, and major anniversaries. He concludes that the United States’ current whiplash-inducing tariff policy, increasingly cruel response to immigrants, and nearly unanimous Congressional votes along party lines fulfills all five preconditions. The contemporary political environment, he argues, is “a near perfect storm for heightening the sense of what is at stake in conflicts over the meaning of the Revolution and the nation’s origins.” Not to mention that the exclusionary patriotism and obligatory flag-waving of the Cold War, which persisted until the George H. W. Bush administration, set the stage for a world order predicated on American exceptionalism, an exceptionalism purportedly dreamed up and initiated by the founders. This vision, no matter how divorced from reality, has proven too attractive for some Americans to let it go.Footnote ²²

We should reflect on that. Lepore suggests that the Tea Party and its successors on the conservative right are playing fast and loose with the facts, all the while upholding themselves as the only true protectors of the national past. Hattem worries the United States is careening toward a dangerous point of no return, a point at which the Revolution becomes nothing more than a weapon in the armory of political warfare. Sehat and Burstein warned that we were already there in 2014. Even Schocket, who offers the most apolitical analysis of the bunch, suggests that the founders rest at the center of the nation’s most virulently partisan debates.Footnote ²³

While these scholars agree that invocations of the Revolution by political operators on the left are generally more historically grounded than those coming from the right, Democrats and progressive reformers have not been faultless, or even all that consistent. Over the last century, they have vacillated between selectively celebrating the inclusivity of specific founders and confining their application of the Revolution to inoffensive, aspirational, and largely unnuanced concepts and abstractions. They have unmoored such important constructs as “liberty,” “equality,” and even “democracy” from their historical circumstance and the men who first articulated them. As evolving social values make it politically disadvantageous for people on the left to acknowledge any meaningful kinship with the Revolution’s key figures, many of whom were enslavers, continued invocations of their ideals from that side of the aisle runs the risk of fully divorcing foundational American concepts from the founding itself. Not to mention that relying on such abstractions could result in a deterministic and Whiggish interpretation of the American past that obscures the sacrifices and hardships intrinsic to social progress in the United States.

Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fell into the trap of distorting Revolutionary sentiments along these lines in the interest of emotional appeal and rhetorical efficacy. As Sehat argues, “King assumed … that American politics was a living tradition in which ideals derived from the past could grow over time. The march [on Washington] embodied this idea, with its onward flow from Washington (the founding) to Lincoln (emancipation) and then looking into the present and the future (King’s dream).” In comparing “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” to a “promissory note” issued by the “architects of our republic” and “to which every American was to fall heir,” King contended that it was the responsibility of his contemporaries to finally fulfill the promises of the founding generation.Footnote ²⁴ Suggesting that the Americans of the 1960s were simply cashing a promissory note written in the eighteenth century obfuscated the founders’ original intent and allowed the American people to avoid grappling with the uncomfortable realities of their past.

In fact, some scholars have started to suggest that 1776 and the Revolution ought not to be celebrated as the nation’s founding moment for this very reason. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, which first made waves in the New York Times Magazine before appearing as a 2021 edited collection with contributions from numerous prominent historians, argues that the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony in 1619 is a more apt origin point for American history. “The United States,” she contends, “is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.” The founders had no intention of extending the tenets of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to the people they enslaved. In fact, “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.” Other works have drawn similar conclusions. Karen and Barbara Fields argue that white Americans, including the founders, constructed regimes of racial oppression to resolve the moral incompatibility between the nation’s stated ideals and the institution of slavery. Race, then, was a product of racism, not the other way around. Aziz Rana likewise posits that there were “two faces of American freedom: our long-standing difficulty in imagining liberty without suppression and free citizenship without the control of subject communities.” Even with these scholars and numerous others pointing out the intrinsic hypocrisy of the nation’s founding ideals and showing the extent to which the nation’s development relied on systems of unfreedom, however, the Revolution continues to function as a powerful political symbol in our national discourse. It is not likely to disappear.Footnote ²⁵

Nor, I would argue, should it. Generations of Americans have strived to make real these promises of liberty and equality, including the very same populations that have historically been barred from enjoying the rights demanded during the Revolution. These ideals—though far from realized—are aspirational and worthwhile. Dr. King’s ethos did assume that the country could be better than it was, that the words of the Revolution could be expanded to encompass more diverse populations than the founders ever intended. Hannah-Jones agrees that America’s self-proclaimed idealism has been central to African American life and protest throughout American history. “Despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all,” she argues in the 1619 Project, “black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.” Progress is neither inevitable nor impossible. Disregarding the Revolution’s stated principles altogether would undermine a long history of effort in pursuit of these ideals and relinquish them to unscrupulous political forces that will not hesitate to abuse them.Footnote ²⁶

But what can historians do now? Scholars, I would argue, have a crucial role to play in understanding and, if possible, channeling Hattem’s “perfect storm,” in part by accessibly communicating both the process of historical interpretation and the dangers of weaponizing the historic past. Scholarship recounting how different political factions have used and are using the memory of the Revolution to advance their own agendas is invaluable. Likewise, parsing how and why the American population came to have such differing opinions as to their national past is crucial to understanding the core tensions of the contemporary political divide. But this type of study has its limits.Footnote ²⁷

Offering a scholarly rendering of different commemorations without weighing in forcefully as an arbitrator runs the risk of inadvertently legitimizing interpretations of the American Revolution and its leaders that are disconnected from the historical record. It is not enough just to explain what conservative and liberal factions think about the Revolution; that ground is well trod. People on the left and people on the right clearly see the Revolution differently. Future scholars of Revolutionary memory would be well served to weigh in directly on what the Revolution actually did and what the founders actually believed. Scholars should discuss the material realities of the Revolution in direct relation to how these events and figures are being (mis)remembered. We, as historians, should also be putting as much emphasis on how subsequent groups of Americans pursued, advocated, and challenged these Revolutionary beliefs as we do on the beliefs themselves. In doing so, we can grapple meaningfully with the limitations of the Revolution without abandoning the valuable principles born from it; we can contend with the fact that the founders never planned for the full realization of the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” they promised without giving up on those precepts ourselves.

Likewise, we should actively combat distortions from both the left and the right, as they each have the capacity to advance unhelpful and ahistoric interpretations of the nation’s founding moment. By cutting through some of the layers of abstraction and melding the commemorative and the symbolic with the real, the field of Revolutionary War memory and commemoration may get Americans a bit closer to understanding what is truly collective, and not just subject to interpretation, about our national past.