About the project
How have Americans remembered, retold, and debated the events and ideas of the American Revolution across the past 250 years?
Remembering the Revolution offers a dynamic collection of resources for teachers, students, and history buffs of all kinds that offers a window into this fascinating and complicated ongoing process.
Key Principles
Memory: Memories of the American Revolution, like all memories, have been constructed by particular people, at particular moments in time, for particular purposes. In other words, all memories reflect the contexts in which they were produced.
Conflicting Views: Over the last 250 years, Americans have never been in full agreement on the history or meaning of the American Revolution. Varied and conflicting interpretations have coexisted in every moment and in every time period.
Range of Perspectives: To gain the fullest and most illuminating understanding of how Americans have remembered, retold, and debated the events and ideas of the American Revolution, it is greatly beneficial to consult the perspectives of a wide range of Americans.
Range of Media: Americans have constructed memories of the Revolution through a wide range of media, including: speeches, paintings, academic histories, editorials, public celebrations, monuments, museum exhibitions, protests, classroom instruction, movies, plays, novels, among others.
Teaching Focus: Remembering the Revolution is designed to support teachers and students as they do the crucial work, year in and year out, of engaging the history and memory of the American Revolution.
Non-Partisan: Remembering the Revolution does not align with any particular political party or cause. Such alignment would fundamentally contradict its teaching focus.
Extensibility: Remembering the Revolution will function as a platform for the ongoing creation and dissemination of teaching resources by New American History and the teachers and students that it serves.
People
Remembering the Revolution was created by the staff of New American History, a digital history initiative based at the University of Richmond.
- Project Lead: Andy Hammann, Senior Historian
- Learning Resources Lead: Annie Evans, Director of Education and Outreach
- Chief Advisor: Ed Ayers, Founder and Head
- Website Design and Construction: Journey Group
Remembering the Revolution was also created in partnership with Bunk, a website that aggregates some of the most interesting, current thinking about American History.
Key References
These books served as crucial references for the compilation of the Original Source Library. Anyone looking to contextualize any specific document will benefit from perusing them further.
- Hattem, Michael D. The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History. Yale University Press, 2024.
- Kammen, Michael G. A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination. Knopf, 1978.
- McDonnell, Michael A., Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, eds. Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War. University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.
Many of the articles and podcasts included in the Current Conversations portion of the website came from Bunk, a partner of New American History.