Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 13: Sean Wilentz on Slavery and the American Revolution

The American Revolution is a key founding myth of the United States. (As well as a factual historical event, of course!) Interpretations of it vary, both in academic discussions and in popular political understandings. From the beginning, there were more conservative adherents and more radical ones. Paul Revere and Thomas Paine could be taken as symbols of those two poles, respectively.

And over time, there have been interpretations made from a range of ideological and partisan viewpoints. On the academic side of the discussion, a lot of the differences are related to how "revolutionary" the American Revolution was, in the sense of how drastically it altered fundamental social and class relations, how much it democratized governance, and what the sources of it were. The status of slavery is a key issue in those perceptions, as is the question of to what extent the Constitution represented the democratic impulses of the Revolution.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/confederate-heritage-month-april-d4e