The Memory of ’76

“For nearly 2½ centuries, Americans have built monuments, written plays, painted scenes of battle, marched in parades, published books and showcased documents for the simple purpose of keeping alive memories of the American Revolution. Michael D. Hattem … ably chronicles this national habit in The Memory of ’76.”—D. G. Hart, Wall Street Journal

Finalist for the 2025 George Washington Book Award, co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon

“Michael Hattem has given us a brilliant and timely history of the ‘origin myth’ of the United States. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, amid questions about the future of our republic, this clear-eyed and cogent presentation of what the founding has meant to our history is exactly what we need.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

“Describing the changing public memory of the American Revolution from the death of George Washington to the present, Hattem serves as an excellent guide to making sense of the many ways the loud, raucous, and increasingly democratic people of the United States have fought over the role of the past in justifying their various political movements, commitments, and beliefs. As Hattem shows, a free people will never entirely agree—except about the importance of our unique Founding to understand our great experiment in self-governance.”—Douglas Bradburn, president and CEO, George Washington’s Mount Vernon

“Michael Hattem’s Memory of ’76 shows that the American Revolution was infinitely more interesting than our primary-school pageants let on, that the struggles of the Revolutionary War never really ceased, and that our arguments over what the war meant have reshaped the meaning of America.”—Woody Holton, author of Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution

Michael D. Hattem is a historian of early America and author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution. He is the associate director of the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute and lives in New Haven, CT.

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