Heather Cox Richardson posted on her June 7th Letters from an American column, introducing Ten Steps to Revolution:
“The hard lessons of history seem to be repeating themselves in the U.S. these days, and with the nation’s 250th anniversary approaching, some friends and I got to talking about how we could make our real history more accessible.
“After a lot of brainstorming, we have come up with Journey to American Democracy: a series of short videos about American history that we will release on my YouTube channel, Facebook, and Instagram. [What they released was] a set of videos that can be viewed individually or can be watched together to simulate a survey course about an important event or issue in American history.
“Journey to American Democracy explores how democracy has always required blood and sweat and inspiration to overcome the efforts of those who would deny equality to their neighbors. It examines how, for more than two centuries, ordinary people have worked to make the principles the founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence the law of the land.
“Those principles establish that we have a right to be treated equally before the law, to have a say in our government, and to have equal access to resources.”
A crash course in America
“In late April, in an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, [FOTUS] showed Moran that he had had a copy of the Declaration of Independence hung in the Oval Office. The interview had been thorny, and Moran used his calling attention to the Declaration to ask a softball question. He asked [FOTUS] what the document that he had gone out of his way to hang in the Oval Office meant to him.
“He answered: ‘Well, it means exactly what it says, it’s a declaration. A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.’
“The Declaration of Independence is indeed very special to our country. But it is not a declaration of love and unity. It is the radical declaration of Americans that human beings have the right to throw off a king in order to govern themselves. That story is here, in the first video series of Journey to American Democracy called ‘Ten Steps to Revolution.'”
From the YouTube page: “Journey to American Democracy examines how ordinary people worked to make the principles the founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence the law of the land. This series, Ten Steps to Revolution, explains how the king’s American subjects came to oppose monarchy and, over the course of only thirteen years, to embrace the right to govern themselves.”
Also
Transcription: Two years ago, in partnership with the National Park Service, the National Archives set an audacious goal to transcribe the more than 2.5 million pages found in the Revolutionary War Pension Files by America’s 250th on July 4th, 2026. Together with the National Park Service, we spread the word and recruited volunteers. In our first year, Citizen Archivists transcribed 65,000 pages, and we were so excited to see the stories of America’s first veterans that they uncovered.
Tories: From the Smithsonian: The Defiant Loyalists Who Chose the Wrong Side in the American Revolution. American colonists who aligned with the British lost their lands, their reputations, and sometimes even their lives.
“The popular image of the American Revolution may be of fired-up colonists united in the fight to overthrow their British rulers. But the reality was far more complicated. Many historians estimate that at least 15 to 20 percent of the population remained loyal to the crown, some even taking up arms against their rebellious neighbors and fighting alongside the British.
The Boss: Land of Hope and Dreams intro by Bruce Springsteen
