1776 Salon

Professors Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer draw from their very popular course “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac,” which they have co-taught to thousands of students in Harvard College and Harvard Extension School since 2001.

Harvard Professor Jill Lepore tells the story of Benjamin Franklin’s long-forgotten sister, Jane, and meditates on what it means to write history not from what can be found, but from what has been lost.

Presented in partnership with Revolutionary Spaces.

Harvard Professor Vincent Brown examines the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, known as Tacky’s Revolt. Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Brown’s new book Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.

When Congress members want to explore new ways to interpret Constitutional clauses, they typically turn to lawyers, even though historians, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians might offer different, and perhaps better, insights. Using our nation’s current events as a case study, Harvard Law School Professor Mark Tushnet explores Thomas Jefferson’s reflections on the decline of popular constitutionalism, a model in which all citizens were encouraged to voice and offer their interpretations of the Constitution.

Professor David A. Moss, author of the acclaimed book Democracy: A Case Study, makes history come alive with an audience-driven discussion on how our republic—and democracy as we know it—came about. In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, the country was in trouble. Many of the nation’s founders feared that their young republic was coming apart and that they had to act decisively to save it. They asked the most fundamental questions: How do we bring the nation together? How do we empower the majority while preserving the rights of the minority? How do we distribute power between the federal government and the states? They struggled mightily to answer them. Professor Moss will pose these same questions to attendees, bringing his wildly popular Harvard course on American democracy to a new stage in this one-time public forum. There will be a short, pre-event reading distributed to participants to prepare for a lively, in-depth discussion during the program.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of United States of America, it is worthwhile to consider what it means to be a citizen of the country that was created in 1776. Harvard Professor Annette Gordon-Reed explores the questions of how citizenship is expressed in this modern context, how we kept the republic, and what might the future hold for our republic.