The last big anniversary of the nation’s founding was the bicentennial in 1976. As the semiquincentennial approaches, we have been frequently reminded of all the significant changes that have taken place in American life over the past 50 years: Our society does not look as it did just a decade after the civil rights era; our politics do not live by the same rules as they did in the aftermath of Watergate; our technology does not function as it did when Apple was only three months old. Our history has changed too. In the last 50 years, our knowledge has been greatly expanded as scholars worked to uncover the stories of average people in societies of the past. This approach, known generally as social history, has been around a long time (it is often said to originate with the Annales school, a group of French historians and social scientists who loosely collected around an influential intellectual journal that was founded in 1929), but its influence on American history has become more pronounced. During that time, the way historians tell the story of the American Revolution has changed profoundly. For the country’s first 200 years or so, the main subjects of that drama were the founding fathers (a term introduced in 1916 by President Warren G. Harding); the rise of social history has brought many more subjects onto the stage with them. The sense that there is one fixed perspective from which to see the Revolution has been replaced by the understanding that there are many. Indeed, one of the landmark books of this period, by the historian Alan Taylor, was titled “American Revolutions.” To mark the semiquincentennial, we set out to tell the story of the Revolution with this approach. We wanted to give readers a sense of what it’s like to experience the familiar drama through unfamiliar eyes. We asked seven historians (including Taylor) to choose an important but often overlooked figure from the founding era. These “everyday founders” became our protagonists in a retelling of the Revolution that will hopefully demonstrate how history itself has changed in the past 50 years. We called our project “Visions of America” because one thing our subjects had in common is that they had their own dreams of what the country that emerged from independence could become. We then brought on an illustrator, Tim McDonagh, to visually represent this history in a transportive, cinematic style. One question raised by social history is what we are to make of the political and military leaders who used to be the entire cast of the play. Do they matter less? Have they been replaced? How do they relate to the kinds of figures highlighted in our project? To wrestle with these questions, we turned to the historian Jane Kamensky, an emerita professor at Harvard University and the current president of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, who has written extensively, across numerous books, about American history. In her introduction to our project, Kamensky writes that our history needs to find a way to include it all, “both the towering few and the faceless many.” Kamensky, Taylor and some of the other historians involved in this project will be responding to comments on their stories over the next few days. So if you want to discuss any of this, head over to the comment threads. And happy semiquincentennial. Read the stories here. Stay in touch: Like this email? Forward it to a friend and help us grow. Loved a story? Hated it? Write us a letter at magazine@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up here to get the magazine newsletter.
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