January 5, 2026: 2026 Anniversaries: Reframing 1776

[The start of a new year means my annual series on historic anniversaries. Leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m planning for my Spring semester sabbatical!]

On three pairs of events that collectively help us complicate our narratives of the Revolution’s most foundational and famous year on its 250^th anniversary.

1)      Moore’s Creek Bridge and Trenton: The December 26^th battle of Trenton, New Jersey is one of the Revolution’s most famous military conflicts, as much for what preceded it (Washington’s crossing of the Delaware that led to a surprise attack on the British Hessian forces) as what followed it (a significant uptick in Continental Army morale and enlistment). But as with most Revolutionary collective memory, the mythos around such moments can limit our fuller understanding of the war and period, and so I think it would be important to complement Trenton with the year’s first military conflict, at North Carolina’s Moore’s Creek Bridge on February 27^th. At that battle, the Revolutionary forces met up against fellow Americans, Loyalist troops and leaders, a significant difference from the mercenary Hessian opponents Washington faced in Trenton. The “sides” in the Revolution were much more multilayered than we often remember, and this second 1776 battle helps us remember that fraught fact.

2)      Common Sense and The Crisis: The contexts for those two 1776 battles also reflect how much had changed during the 10 intervening months. But I’m not sure anything better captures the arc of that tumultuous year than its two publications from the journalist, printer, and activist Thomas Paine. On January 10^th Paine published Common Sense, a persuasive pamphlet in which Paine makes the case for why all Americans should support the incipient (but clearly in Paine’s perspective not quite fully underway, or at least not a given) Revolution. On December 23^rd he published the first of what would be sixteen installments of The American Crisis, a persuasive pamphlet in which Paine makes the case for why all Americans should keep the faith despite significant losses in the now-clearly-established war with England. Even the concept of “Americans” had evolved a great deal between these two texts—in Common Sense it’s an idea for which Paine argues, while in The American Crisis it’s an established identity from the title on.

3)      July 1^st and 4^th: I’m sure I don’t have to say much about July 4^th, and why it (or, pace John Adams, July 2^nd) will occupy such a significant place in our 250^th anniversaries this year. But I’m equally sure that almost no Americans, this AmericanStudier admittedly included, have thought much at all about the Revolutionary conflict that began on July 1^st, 1776, when Cherokee warriors (with the support of the British) attacks American settlements on the new nation’s western frontier. Known as the Cherokee War, this conflict would continue until the spring of 1777, when the Cherokee signed a May 20^th peace treaty with officials from four states. Over the last few months I’ve been gradually reading Ned Blackhawk’s magisterial The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023), and I agree with Blackhawk that our memories and narratives of events like the Revolution won’t be complete until we can make histories like the Cherokee War far more central to them.

Next historic anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?