In the 50 years since the bicentennial, the last major celebration of the nation’s birth, our knowledge of the American Revolution has radically expanded. The founders remain the central figures, but since the 1970s, historians have uncovered the fascinating, dramatic lives of many other players whose contributions were previously overlooked or lost in the archives.
To mark the country’s 250th anniversary, The New York Times Magazine asked seven leading historians to each write about one of these “everyday founders.” Seen through their perspectives, the story looks different. Read, for example, the story of “Good Peter,” the Native leader who tied his People’s fate to the Patriot cause.
Other everyday founders include Hermon Husband, the backwoods agitator who challenged the new nation to be truly democratic; Mercy Otis Warren, a Patriot housewife whose plays helped push America toward revolution; John Leland, the itinerant preacher who helped secure the separation of church and state; Lemuel Haynes, the man of faith who heard a righteous call in the founding credo; Joseph Plumb Martin, the teenage soldier who revealed how the Patriots truly won the war; and Elizabeth Freeman, the enslaved woman who sued for freedom and emancipated herself.
“To fully comprehend the American Revolution, we need both the towering few and the faceless many,” Jane Kamensky, president of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and an emerita historian at Harvard University, writes in her introduction to the project. “All were ordinary and made themselves extraordinary. All took advantage of a moment of possibility—of rupture—to pursue happiness for themselves, their families, their people, their country.”