Fighting over the Founders

Explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in US history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the pasttwo decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also a site to work out the present, and the future. Whatare we using the Revolution to debate?In Fighting over the Founders, Andrew M. Schocket explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. Identifying competing “essentialist” and “organicist” interpretations of the American Revolution, Schocket shows how today’s memories of the American Revolution reveal Americans' conflicted ideas about class, about race, and about gender—as well as the nature of history itself. Fighting over the Founders plumbs our views of the past and the present, and illuminates our ideas of what United States means to its citizens in the new millennium.

Schockets book will rightly become a must-read for specialists in the American Revolution and the early Republic, as well as for those engaged with understanding how history can become a way of entry into national self-understanding. His sharp-eyed approach to historic sites, museums, and parks and to such films asThe PatriotandNational Treasure...is particularly perceptive and enlightening., The book is most insightful when Schocket leaves aside his two categories and listens to what the American Revolution means to guides and visitors at historical sites, public television producers, and Revolutionary War reenactors. They all seek an emotional connection to this heritage and long to be inspired by it, while being aware that representations of the past can never do full justice to its complexity., Afast-paced, often insightful, sometimes funny book aimed at the general reader. This is a subject of crucial importance to our understanding of American national identity."Schocket's book . . .will appeal to all readers with an interest in the contemporary meaning of the American founding, Schocket distinguishes between & essentialists who see the founders as demigods and who emphasize the founders belief in private property and Protestantism, and & organicists, who believe Americans are still in the process of trying to complete the Revolution. Covering the years since 2000, the book analyzes presidential speeches and debates as well as best-selling books, popular movies, and historic sites., In dealing with historic sites the tension between representing a complex history and satisfying sponsors and the public is richly conveyed. Schocket also brings out the problematic black experience at these sites, including the often thin representation of their Revolution, the racial imbalance in visitors of the sites, and the persistence of employment disparity.

Andrew M. Schocket is Director of American Culture Studies and Associate Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University (OH). He is the author of Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia.