Category: History

For years, National Public Radio held a July 4th tradition of sharing a reading of the Declaration of Independence during Morning Edition using a montage of the many voices heard on air. At the risk of sounding patriotically sentimental, this was something I looked forward to each year.

It really is quite stirring to hear the Declaration of Independence read aloud, by voices you know and love, accompanied by stirring music. The refreshing flush of pride when you hear, “…we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” at the end sets the tone for another year. You can still hear it here: https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1011754245/an-npr-tradition-heres-the-reading-of-the-declaration-of-independence

2021 was the last year NPR performed this annual reading. In 2022, an editorial disclaimer was added to the web pages where you can hear these renditions with voices of the past: 

Editor’s note on July 8, 2022: This story quotes the U.S. Declaration of Independence — a document that contains offensive language about Native Americans, including a racial slur.

Since 2021, NPR has not ignored the Declaration; rather than reading it aloud, programs have discussed it. The Declaration of Independence, as stirring and revolutionary a document as it may be, is flawed. In its day, it was what was needed, and it was a reflection of its times. The second paragraph begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” a notion that gnaws at many. 

Abigail Adams, whose husband John was instrumental in the birth of the Declaration, wrote to her husband, who was attending as a delegate to the 2nd Continental Congress (or Congreff, for Stan Freberg fans…) in March of 1776, urging him to, “remember the ladies.” 

They did not, and right off the bat one half of the population was left out of those self-evident truths. 

Much ink has been spilled over the caustic irony of a man who held slaves holding the pen that scratched those words on parchment. 

In 2021, NPR noted editorially,  “…after last summer’s protests and our national reckoning on race, the words in the document land differently.” Those protests fall into the general category of “Black Lives Matter” protests, kicked off by protests resulting from the wrongful death of George Floyd, a black man, under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis, MN.

I don’t disagree with NPR’s hand-wringing—at its very root, I understand it. Our founding document is flawed by our current standards. So, too, are our founding fathers. And yet…the Declaration of Independence deserves its annual day of celebration. Flawed? Yes, but the aspirations contained therein have inspired many other oppressed people around the world.

This year, our 250th anniversary of this document, is especially precious. We’ve discussed it, analyzing its flaws and reconciling our conscience with the hypocrisies of the men who set forth the reason for our collection of colonies to become a free nation. In this year, more than any, it’s worth taking the time to read it. Or to hear it read aloud. The beauty of the document lies in its horrible irony: the list of grievances. The delegates signed on to a document that did more than hold truths self evident: they provided receipts. 

Among the 27 enumerated grievances the colonies had with the King, we read that the “refusal of assent to laws,” endeavoring “to prevent the population of these States,” for keeping “among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” the “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments,” were enough to bring men together to form revolutionary ideas

For a long time, libertarians have rallied around this grievance: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

While NPR stopped reading the Declaration because some of the words in the document “…read differently now,” just those few grievances I quoted above read alarmingly similar today as they did when they were written. Spoiler alert: the conclusion the Declaration reaches after enumerating all 27 grievances is that anyone who does such things is a tyrant.

The Declaration of Independence should be celebrated, every day. Not just on the 4th of July. It is a reminder of what great (yes, flawed, but still great) minds wrought with words, establishing a new idea for what makes a nation.

This document does not belong to any party or person; it sets the stage for the free nation that would come into being a few years later with the words “We the people…”

Take some time today—every day—to refresh yourself with this magnificent document. Warts and all, it still holds up, and is more important than ever.

Happy Fourth of July, all.

2026 Is going to be a year of history, if not an historic year in its own right, if this morning’s news about our military action in Venezuela is any kind of harbinger of things to come. This past year was a whirlwind of, well, shit, as the “Flood The Zone With Shit” playbook¹ was opened to every chapter. 

What has concerned me all along me is the zone flooding was only the beginning, as norms were tested to the breaking point again and again and again. As we head into this year, I call it a year of history not because of today’s headlines, but because 2026 marks the Semiquincentennial of the event we mark as the birth of our nation. In July, we will celebrate 250 years since fifty six men from 13 colonies declared the independence of those colonies from their sovereign across the pond.²

It would be a dozen years before we arrived at the form of governance we are still – theoretically – working under. The actual date of our nation’s birth can arguably be pegged to a few major events, but the events of early July in 1776 are a good place to find consensus on our origin story.

Folks in the commonwealth of Massachusetts would like you to think that they started it all about fifteen months earlier, with the famous shots fired on the Lexington Common and the bridge in Concord in April of 1775, celebrated annually as Patriot’s Day, a state holiday in Massachusetts and Maine (the latter being part of the former when the events occurred…).

We all heard about Paul Revere’s famous ride…but growing up, the version we heard in seacoast NH was the ride that happened five months before the ride memorialized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem (recitals of which, curiously, were also part of growing up back in the day). On December 14, 1774, Revere rode north to Portsmouth, NH, to warn the militia there that the British were sending troops to reinforce Fort William and Mary, which commanded the Piscataqua River entrance to the Portsmouth Harbor. Men from Rye, Dover, Durham, and Madbury raided the fort and stole its stores.³ Shots were fired – the first time colonial militia fired on British regulars – but it was a small group of troops in the fort, quickly overcome by the mob. Admittedly it was a far cry from what went down the following April – but it was still first.

Of course, the notion of violence in the face of the British rules for the colonies was expressed a year prior, on December 16, 1773, when the famous Boston Tea Party began a long tradition of polluting Boston’s Harbor (it was followed a few days later by the Philadelphia Tea Party, which few outside of Philly or history buffs are even aware was a thing). This wasn’t the taking up of arms agains British Troops, but it acted like a canon shot across the bow.

The point in all of this is to say that we the people are going to have myriad opportunities to re-learn (or in some cases learn) the story of our nation with a big-number birthday as a backdrop. Ken Burns is helping out with his take on the American Revolutionary War; over the course of the year we can expect to see a number of television programs, magazine spreads, analysis, commentary, and assorted coverage in the many media out there.

The problem with this is the background against which we have to celebrate this anniversary: a government led by a man and cabal more interested in rewriting history, calling truth “fake news,” and self-serving for their own tainted glory and legacy. I shan’t recount the unilateral actions taken by this administration that fly in the face of the law, the norms, or the history of our governance, but I will point out one of the more visible affronts, wherein the president gutted the board at the Kennedy Center, which last month, in turn, voted to rename the center with the president’s name.

From nytimes.com:

[The presdident] said on Thursday that he was “surprised” and “honored” that the center’s board, of which he is the chairman, had thought to do this for him, almost as if it were coming out of the blue. And yet he has been referring to the center as “[president’s name]-Kennedy” in social media posts for months — and the new lettering for the building’s face was all ready to go the next morning.

It is only a distraction, of course. It takes an act of Congress (even a supine one) to make that change, as it took an act of congress to create the center in the first place, as the nation’s memorial to the slain Kennedy. The president could just as easily fake a name change to the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials or the Washington Monument – and, honestly, I would not put it past him to do so – but that would not change the reason those memorials were erected.

We have seen, in his first administration and now the second one, an inclination to rewrite history with the levers available in the Oval Office.⁴ Narratives are being changed in museums, for example, to make the Civil War seem less about slavery and more about “state’s rights.”

By the time we get to July, what will the story as portrayed on our federal stages of our nation’s origin look like?

This is not an original thought or concern. Nor is it new – nine years ago I wrote a piece arguing that we cannot allow ourselves to normalize what we see as if it is somehow normal.

This year will be a year of history. Merriam-Webster defines history as, “a chronological record of significant events (such as those affecting a nation or institution) often including an explanation of their causes.” We have a record of events that won’t change. Names, dates, times, places of things that happened to make ours an independent nation are all well -documented and won’t change.

What will change, and has been for some time now, is the power with which those who wish to change the explanation of things can amplify their skewed version of who we are as a nation, and twist that perception to their vile ends.

You know – flooding the zone with their shit.

Then again, this is a year of history, being written down today for the story of how we met this challenge as it will be told years from now. What will they be saying at the Semiquincentennial of our Constitution a dozen years from now?

Assuming we make it that far…

1. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources ↩︎
2. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript ↩︎
3. https://nhmuseumtrail.org/raid-on-fort-william-and-mary/ ↩︎
4. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/us/museum-censorship-smithsonian-risks ↩︎