On this Fourth of July morning, as I scroll through my Evernote database of 800+ tagged notes on the Revolution, I’m struck by two recurring realizations: how little I knew when I first taught this history in the 1990s, and how much I still don’t know.
Back then, my arsenal was sparse: a dog-eared copy of A.J. Langguth’s Patriots, a textbook, and a handful of printouts from the dial-up internet. Yet even with those limitations, I managed to convey the visceral reality of the Revolution to students by describing the 1765 mob attack on Thomas Hutchinson’s house—shattered plates, slashed portraits, children’s clothing strewn across the yard. The textbook provided little to humanize history, but Langguth’s account helped students feel the Revolution’s chaos. They didn’t have to memorize any more facts to know more about the Revolution.
By the mid-2000s, my catalog had expanded with David Hackett Fischer’s detailed narratives in Paul Revere’s Ride and Washington’s Crossing, Gordon Wood’s ideological analysis in Empire of Liberty, Bernard Bailyn’s foundational essays, and many more digitized primary sources. I collaborated with high school teachers to design lessons pitting Wood against Howard Zinn, and with 3rd grade teachers to have students compare Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware with Jacob Lawrence’s modernist interpretations, using Lauren Tarshis’s take on Joseph Plum Martin’s diary. A fifth-grade team wrestled with whether to mention the killing of 11-year-old Christopher Seider in the lead-up to the Boston Massacre—a debate we never resolved.
Today, three decades in, I’m drawing on an even broader knowledge base of Nathaniel Philbrick, Erica Armstrong-Dunbar, Russell Shorto, Nancy Isenberg, Alan Taylor, Elizabeth Fenn, Woody Holton, Annette Gordon Wood, and Jill Lepore, as well as all the essays, journals, letters and pamphlets of the period they introduced me to. Still, reading Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming recently made me feel like a novice again, but I can better describe what events in the Revolution looked, smelled, and felt like.
When resources were scarce, fact choice and lesson design was relatively simple. Now, with infinite content at our fingertips, how do we decide what’s essential? Or, more importantly, do we have to?
Consider a story I’d never encountered until Woody Holton’s Liberty Is Sweet: In 1782, Prime Minister Lord Rockingham—the same man who’d pushed the Declaratory Act (asserting Parliament’s absolute authority over the colonies)—offered to recognize American independence after Yorktown. But France, bound by treaty, blocked the peace until Britain surrendered Gibraltar to Spain. This geopolitical question, which was vital to the war’s actual end, is absent from every textbook I’ve ever seen. Teachers meticulously cover the Olive Branch Petition because it has been deemed important, but Rockingham’s failed overture for peace isn’t even known.
How can we ignore this contradiction? We insist certain facts must be taught while remaining ignorant of swaths of history that might challenge those very choices. We insist students memorize “50 essential facts” that we chose out of the list of the 100 facts that we ourselves know, ignoring the fact that there’s a list of at least 1,000 that we don’t even know about yet.
Maybe the way out of the fact choice dilemma is the realization that we shouldn’t teach the Revolution as a static canon of essential facts, but rather a living inquiry that we are still pursuing ourselves. That could free us of making impossible choices that we’re not even equipped to make.