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America’s 250th: Experts available on Revolutionary War, Civil War and modern era

‘Americans have been fighting about the Revolution’s meaning ever since the Revolution itself’

EVANSTON, Ill. — America’s Semiquincentennial, the year-long commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, officially begins July 4. Historians from Northwestern University are available to speak with media on the history of the U.S. from the Revolutionary War to the modern era.

Journalists may request an interview by emailing the expert directly or by contacting Stephanie Kulke at stephanie.kulke@northwestern.edu or media@northwestern.edu.

Available historians:

Kate Masur is the John D. MacArthur Professor of History at Northwestern and an expert on the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the history of the “American paradox” of freedom and slavery. Her books include “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She can be reached at kmasur@northwestern.edu. 

Professor Masur on the “American paradox”:

“The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence invites us to reflect on the classic ‘American paradox.’ The nation’s political founders talked incessantly about liberty and equality while also allowing racial slavery to continue and expand. Many were, themselves, wealthy slaveowners. It was only decades later, in the wake of the Civil War, that the United States finally abolished slavery and the principle of equality finally entered the Constitution. That’s why Reconstruction is often known today as the nation’s ‘Second Founding.’  I hope this year’s anniversary will be an occasion for thinking about the whole of American history.” 

Daniel Immerwahr is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and an expert on U.S. foreign relations, global history and environmental history. His books include “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.” He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, which published his essay “The Shot Heard Round the World?” about the American Revolution. He can be reached at daniel.immerwahr@northwestern.edu.

Professor Immerwahr on taking a global view of America’s revolution:

“People from the United States have long assumed that their revolution was of monumental global importance. It was ‘the most significant event in human history since the birth of Christ,’ the documentarian Ken Burns has insisted. But recent historians have been less convinced of that. It no longer seems, as it did to U.S. historians at the time of the Bicentennial, that the American Revolution inspired the French one. We now tend to see the American Revolution as just one among many. That’s a little deflating, but it might be a useful kind of deflating, helping people in the United States give up this notion that they’re the main characters of world history.”

Caitlin Fitz is an associate professor of history at Northwestern and an expert on early American history, U.S. relations with Latin America and Sports history. She can be reached at c-fitz@northwestern.edu.

Professor Fitz on the Revolution’s multitude of meanings:

“Americans have been fighting about the Revolution’s meaning ever since the Revolution itself. After all, the Revolution is our national origin story; to define it is to define the United States. Did the revolutionary era prioritize liberty or equality? Freedom or slavery? Anticolonialism or neoimperialism? How far did the right to resistance extend? And how did the spirit of ’76, embodied in the Declaration, differ from the spirit of 1787, embodied in the Constitution? Even today, the Revolution remains a proxy for contemporary debates about taxes, immigration, guns, federal power and the role of religion in public life. While I doubt Americans will ever agree on one interpretation, I hope we can use the 250th anniversary to grapple openly and honestly with the era’s contradictions and complexity. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, the Revolution is large, and it contains multitudes.”

Kevin Boyle is the William Smith Mason Professor of History and department chair and an expert on 20th-century U.S. history. His most recent book is “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.” He can be reached at kevin.boyle@northwestern.edu.

Professor Boyle on understanding America’s complex history:

“As a historian, I want to believe that we have a deeper understanding of the American past than we had when the nation celebrated its bicentennial in 1976. In many ways, we do. But we’re now facing a direct threat to that understanding, as the federal government tries to strip away the public presentation of our history’s complexity. It’s true that an honest reading of the past can re-open wounds. But a wound can’t be healed by pretending it’s not there.”

Associate professor of history Doug Kiel is a citizen of the Oneida Nation and an expert on Native American history and history of the Midwest with an emphasis on law and policy. He can be reached at doug.kiel@northwestern.edu.

Professor Kiel on the dispossession of Native allies to the Revolutionary War:

“The story Americans tell about 1776 is a story about a king. But on the ground, the Revolution was also a settler uprising against an imperial border: the Proclamation of 1763  that Britain had drawn to keep colonists out of Native homelands. What the founders called liberty, sovereign Native nations experienced as conquest by another name. The Oneida people understood this better than most. They fought at Oriskany and wintered at Valley Forge to help secure American independence and were repaid with a dispossession so relentless it drove much of the nation a thousand miles west, to Wisconsin. That is the contradiction the anniversary tends to bury.

“Two hundred and fifty years is a short measure of time on a continent where Native nations have governed for millennia and govern still — recovering homelands, rebuilding economies and exercising jurisdiction today. Indigenous sovereignty was never something the United States granted, and it is not something the United States can confer by apology or anniversary. It predates the republic, and it will outlast the mythologies invented to explain it away.”