The American Revolution
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history
By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North, 6 September 2019
The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times, presents racism and racial conflict as the essential feature and driving force of American history.
What the Supreme Court is repudiating
The Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the ban on cruel and unusual punishment
By Ed Hightower, 24 April 2019
Recent US Supreme Court rulings in death penalty cases represent a vast, anti-democratic cultural, legal and political retrogression.
America on the Fourth of July: From Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump
By Patrick Martin, 4 July 2018
The most fundamental right asserted by the Declaration of Independence is the right of the people to revolt against tyranny and despotism, a right that this generation will be called on to exercise.
Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin museums in Philadelphia closed by Trump administration hiring freeze
By Douglas Lyons, 23 March 2017
The Trump administration’s hiring freeze and threatened budget cuts prompted the National Park Service to close the historic attractions.
The New York Times, Michael Eric Dyson and the politics of race
By Barry Grey, 14 July 2016
The Times is on guard and ready to denounce anything—a political development, a book, even a movie—that challenges its racialist agenda. This agenda has become more and more central as the class struggle has grown more intense.
A reply to our critics
In Defense of the American Revolution
By Tom Mackaman, 14 July 2016
The American Revolution, the most progressive event in world history in its time, continues to inspire the struggle for equality.
Two hundred forty years since the Declaration of Independence
By Andre Damon, 4 July 2016
The American Revolution provided the ideological and political impetus for the French Revolution and all subsequent democratic, egalitarian and socialist movements.
250 years since the Stamp Act
The Coming of the American Revolution
By Tom Mackaman, 24 March 2015
The Stamp Act set into motion a series of events that led, in one decade, to the American Revolution.
Interview with Gordon Wood on the American Revolution: Part two
“History has to engage the whole public”
By Tom Mackaman, 4 March 2015
This is the second part of a two-part interview with Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the American Revolution. Part one was posted March 3.
Interview with Gordon Wood on the American Revolution: Part one
“Labor celebrated as the highest value”
By Tom Mackaman, 3 March 2015
Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the American Revolution, recently spoke with the World Socialist Web Site.
Equality and the Fourth of July
By Joseph Kishore, 4 July 2014
The social, political and cultural state of present-day America make a mockery of the principles that are recalled and celebrated on July 4.
Two milestones in world history
The contemporary significance of the Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Gettysburg
By Joseph Kishore, 1 July 2013
The American Revolution and the Civil War were two of the great events in world history, advancing democratic principles that are everywhere under assault today.
America’s revolutionary founding document
For Liberty and Equality: The Life and Times of the Declaration of Independence
By Tom Mackaman, 4 May 2013
A book that seriously considers the impact the Declaration of Independence is most welcome reading in 2013, a year which has seen an intensifying assault on the most basic principles of America’s founding document.
James P. Cannon on Independence Day
From Karl Marx to the Fourth of July
By James P. Cannon, 3 July 2010
We are posting today for the benefit of our readers an article authored by James P. Cannon, published in The Militanton July 16, 1951. Cannon (1890-1974) was a founding member of the Trotskyist movement in the US and a longtime leader of American Trotskyism.
The Story of Us on History channel—an attempt to revive the myths of American capitalism
By William Moore and Fred Mazelis, 28 June 2010
History (the cable television channel) recently presented a 12-hour series entitled “America: The Story of Us.” The ambitious project spanned the history of the United States from the first European settlements of North America until the present day.
The Nation, Jonathan Israel and the Enlightenment
By Ann Talbot and David North, 9 June 2010
On 12 May this year, the Nation magazine published an article entitled “Mind the Enlightenment.” It is an intellectually unprincipled and vindictive attack on Professor Jonathan Israel’s multi-volume history of the development of the Enlightenment and its relationship to social and political radicalism in the century leading up to the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
An assessment of A People’s History of the United States
By Tom Eley, 15 February 2010
Howard Zinn died on January 28 at the age of 87. Any serious evaluation of Zinn requires consideration be given his book, A People’s History of the United States.
Citizen of the world: a brief survey of the life and times of Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
By Ann Talbot, 8 June 2009
June 8 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of 18th century revolutionary Thomas Paine.
John Adams: A serious rendering of the American Revolution
By Charles Bogle, 8 January 2009
John Adams, first aired on HBO in early 2008 and now released on DVD, is the latest and in some ways most satisfying rendering of the American Revolution on film. The television series covers the last 56 years of Adams’ 90-year life.
An interview with playwright Trevor Griffiths
By Ann Talbot, 21 February 2008
Trevor Griffiths has just published a screenplay for a film about the life of the eighteenth century revolutionary Thomas Paine. He wrote the screenplay for the film Reds with Warren Beatty and has a long list of television and theatre plays to his credit.
A timely reminder of America’s Enlightenment origins
By Charles Bogle, 31 August 2006
Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer, 543 pages, Oxford University Press, 2004, $17.95
July 4th 2006: The state of US democracy 230 years after the American Revolution
By Bill Van Auken, 4 July 2006
This article is available as a PDF leaflet to download and distribute
Secularism and the American Constitution
By Charles Bogle, 18 July 2005
In recent years, Supreme Court justices, politicians and religious figures have advanced the argument that the Founding Fathers based the US Constitution on God’s word. Some have asserted that the Founding Fathers meant for the Constitution to be understood as a Christian document of governance for a Christian nation.
Investigating the foundations of equality
God, Locke and Equality by Jeremy Waldron
By Ann Talbot, 16 June 2003
Professor Jeremy Waldron’s latest book is an examination of the theory of equality put forward by the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke. This is a subject that is highly relevant today as the widening social gulf between the super rich and the rest of the population increasingly undermines the political institutions that have been based on the maintenance of at least a measure of social and economic equality.
An exchange on socialism and human nature
By Nick Beams, 1 May 2001
Beams replies to a letter from a reader about a previous correspondence, which states: “Your letter refuses to acknowledge the true nature of humankind. Centralised planning does not work and history has shown that to be true and so does the present. The freer the society the more prosperous it is.”
Two letters on Thomas Jefferson
30 November 2000
We received the following two letters from a reader in Manteca, California.
No idea whatsoever
The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Robert Rodat
By David Walsh, 14 July 2000
How is the relative dearth of intelligent and artistically satisfying American films about either the Revolutionary War or the Civil War to be accounted for? It has been noted more than once in the past that a people carrying out a revolution may have insufficient energy left over to recreate it artistically. One has to consider as well the intellectual difficulty posed by such struggles for American artists, not normally sensitive to historical and ideological problems. Nor should one leave out of the reckoning the general vulgarity and shallowness of Hollywood studio executives.
The Jefferson-Hemings controversy
In defense of history
By Helen Halyard and Shannon Jones, 31 December 1998
Substantial debate and controversy have accompanied the science journal Nature's release of genetic test results supporting the claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.
Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism
By David North, 24 October 1996
The following is a lecture given by David North, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on 24 October 1996.
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