The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History

About the Book

The surprising history of how Americans have fought over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution for nearly two and a half centuries

Americans agree that their nation's origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas.

In this sweeping take on American history, Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation's history; how African Americans, women, and other oppressed groups have shaped the popular memory of the Revolution; and how much of our contemporary memory of the Revolution is a product of the Cold War.

By exploring the Revolution's unique role in American history as a national origin myth, Hattem shows how the meaning of the Revolution has never been fixed, how remembering the nation's founding has often done far more to divide Americans than to unite them, and how revising the past is an important and long‑standing American political tradition.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“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