Fireside Chat - The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History

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While the American Revolution is the agreed-upon beginning of our nation's origins, the meaning of that revolution has never achieved anywhere near the same degree of consensus. For almost as long as the United States has existed, a wide range of political and social actors have narrativized and reimagined the Revolution to match their current climates and personal agendas.

In this far-reaching account of U.S. history, Dr. Michael D. Hattem explores how conflicting ideas around the Revolution's legacy and significance —including those of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have shaped the most important and controversial events in the nation’s subsequent history; how women of all races, African Americans people of all genders, and other oppressed groups have shaped the Revolution’s existence in popular memory; and the great extent to which our contemporary readings of the Revolution are in fact products of the Cold War.

Through revealing the Revolution’s singular presence as an American national myth, Dr. Hattem reveals the ever-changing nature of the Revolution’s meaning, how the nation’s founding is used far more often as a divisive tool than a unifying one, and how reinventing the past is a central and long-lived American sociopolitical pastime.

Dr. Michael D. Hattem is an American historian with interests in early America, the American Revolution, and historical memory. In addition to The Memory of ’76 (Yale University Press, 2024), he has also written Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020). His work has been featured or mentioned in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Smithsonian Magazine, the Washington Post, as well as many others. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Dr. Hattem was a Library Company 2016-2017 Robert J. McNeil, Jr. Fellow.