Author Archives: Bob Adams

Jefferson Wrote a Draft. Congress Wrote the Declaration.

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Pauline Maier’s American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence is the most essential book in this section. Maier’s meticulous scholarship reconstructs how Congress itself – not Jefferson alone – edited and shaped the final document, making it the definitive account of the Declaration as a collective achievement.

May and June – The Architects of Independence, Part Eight

Every American schoolchild learns the same story: Thomas Jefferson, alone with his portable writing desk in a Philadelphia boarding house, conjured the Declaration of Independence from thin air – a solitary act of genius that changed the world. It is one of the most durable myths in the national imagination. Pauline Maier spent a career dismantling it.

Published in 1997, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence arrived at a moment when the United States was in the middle of one of its periodic arguments about what the founding documents actually mean, who they belong to, and whether they live up to their own promises. That argument has never really stopped. In an era when the Declaration is routinely invoked by politicians of every stripe – as a mandate for immigration, as a rebuke to immigration, as an argument for social transformation, as a defense of tradition – Maier’s meticulous reconstruction of how the document was actually made feels, if anything, more urgent in 2026 than it did nearly thirty years ago. Understanding what the Declaration is requires understanding what it was, and how it got that way.

The Scholar Behind the Argument

Pauline Maier was a historian of early America at MIT, where she taught for decades until her death in 2013. She was not, by temperament, a myth-maker or a debunker for its own sake. Her earlier work – From Resistance to Revolution and The Old Revolutionaries – established her as a scholar of uncommon rigor who was interested in the collective processes of political change rather than the heroic individual. When she turned her attention to the Declaration, she brought that same instinct to bear: what happens when we look at this document not as the product of a single mind, but as the outcome of a long, contentious, and deeply collaborative political process?

The result is a book that is part archival detective story, part intellectual history, and part act of democratic imagination. Maier does not diminish Jefferson. She does something more interesting: she places him inside the machinery of a revolution and shows how that machinery worked.

The Central Argument: Jefferson Did Not Write the Declaration

That is perhaps too stark a way to put it – Jefferson wrote a declaration. But the Declaration of Independence, the one signed on August 2, 1776, the one now enshrined in the National Archives, the one that has shaped two and a half centuries of American political life – that document was written by the Second Continental Congress.

Maier builds this argument on two foundations. The first is her recovery of the dozens of state and local declarations of independence that preceded the Continental Congress’s version. In the months before July 1776, county committees, colonial assemblies, and grand juries across America were drafting their own declarations – documents that articulated the philosophical case for independence, catalogued British abuses, and announced their authors’ readiness to break from the Crown. These were not private letters or pamphlets. They were formal public acts, widely circulated and debated. Jefferson and his colleagues on the drafting committee did not arrive at their task with a blank slate; they arrived with a genre already established, a set of arguments already field-tested, and a vocabulary already in place. The Declaration’s famous second paragraph – the one about self-evident truths and unalienable rights – was not a bolt from the blue. It was the distillation of a conversation already underway across the colonies.

The second foundation of Maier’s argument is her reconstruction of what Congress actually did with Jefferson’s draft. The delegates spent two and a half days going through the document line by line, making more than eighty changes – cutting roughly a quarter of the original text, softening certain phrases, removing others entirely. Jefferson, who was present and kept his own annotated copy, was reportedly miserable throughout. Benjamin Franklin, sitting beside him, tried to cheer him up with a story about a hat-maker whose proposed sign was edited down to nothing but his name. Jefferson did not find it funny.

Maier’s central claim is that this editorial process was not vandalism – it was improvement. Congress’s most significant deletion was Jefferson’s extended and somewhat incoherent attack on the slave trade, in which he blamed George III for introducing slavery into the colonies and then blamed him again for potentially arming enslaved people against the colonists. The passage, Maier shows, was philosophically contradictory and politically unacceptable to delegates from South Carolina and Georgia. Its removal made the document more coherent, not less. The accusation that slavery was the king’s fault was, in any case, historically absurd, and its deletion was an act of editorial honesty – even if the failure to confront slavery directly was a moral catastrophe that the nation would spend the next century paying for in blood.

Immediate Aftermath: The Document Goes to Work

For Jefferson, the weeks following the signing were consumed not by celebration but by a return to Virginia, where he threw himself into the project of reforming the state’s laws – drafting legislation on religious freedom, education, and the revision of the legal code. He was, in some ways, relieved to leave Congress. The experience of having his draft so substantially altered had stung, and he would nurse that grievance for the rest of his life, continuing to send friends copies of his original version alongside the final text so posterity could judge who had written the better document.

Congress, meanwhile, faced the immediate problem of making the Declaration do the work it was designed to do. The document was read aloud in public squares across the colonies, greeted in some places with bonfires and toasts, in others with silence or hostility. George Washington had it read to his troops in New York on July 9 – just as a British fleet was massing in the harbor. Within days, British forces landed on Long Island, and the Continental Army suffered a series of near-catastrophic defeats that came close to ending the revolution before it properly began. The Declaration had announced independence. Washington’s soldiers now had to win it.

A Voice Both Exact and Humane

Maier writes with a precision that never tips into pedantry. Her prose is the prose of a scholar who has spent so long with primary sources that she has internalized their rhythms without being enslaved to them.

On Congress’s editorial work, she is bracingly direct: the delegates “did not see themselves as simple copyeditors” but as co-authors of a collective statement – men who had staked their lives and reputations on the document and therefore had every right to shape it. On the mythology that grew up around Jefferson’s authorship, she notes that the elevation of the Declaration into a kind of secular scripture, with Jefferson as its prophet, was itself a historical process – one that took decades, and that served political purposes that had little to do with what actually happened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776.

One of her most striking observations concerns the document’s second life. The Declaration, she argues, was largely forgotten as a political instrument in the decades immediately following the Revolution. It was Abraham Lincoln who resurrected it – who made the claim that “all men are created equal” was not merely a statement of 1776 but an ongoing promise, a standard against which the nation had always to be measured. The Declaration, in Maier’s account, did not arrive at its current meaning all at once. It was made, and remade, by successive generations who needed it to say something.

Dialogue with the Architects

Read alongside the other books in this series, American Scripture functions as both complement and corrective.

Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters establishes the intellectual world from which the founders emerged – a republic of ideas, shaped by classical learning and Enlightenment philosophy. Maier’s book grounds that world in the specific, messy, intensely practical work of political drafting. The ideas were real; so was the committee.

Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers is preoccupied with personal rivalries and the complicated friendships among the founders. Maier is less interested in personalities than in process. She and Ellis are, in a sense, looking at the same events from different angles: Ellis asks what the men thought of each other; Maier asks what they thought they were making.

David McCullough’s biography of John Adams presents Adams as the driving force behind independence – the man who bullied and persuaded Congress into action and maneuvered Jefferson into the lead role on the drafting committee. Maier’s account neither confirms nor contradicts this, but it shifts the emphasis: even if Adams was the engine, the outcome was shaped by the whole body. Jon Meacham’s Jefferson, for his part, is a figure of almost inexhaustible complexity – a man whose idealism and moral failures coexist in permanent, unresolved tension. Maier’s Jefferson is something slightly different: a gifted writer whose best work was improved by editors he despised.

The book that sits in closest dialogue with American Scripture may be J. Kent McGaughy’s study of Richard Henry Lee. Lee’s resolution of June 7, 1776, was the legislative act that set the drafting process in motion. Maier’s book begins, in a sense, where Lee’s political work ends – she picks up the story at the moment the committee convenes and follows it through to the document’s eventual canonization. Together, the two books reconstruct the full arc from resolution to scripture.

What We Have Learned Since 1997

In the nearly three decades since American Scripture appeared, scholarship on the Declaration has deepened considerably. Historians have paid closer attention to the voices excluded from the founding moment – enslaved people, women, Indigenous nations – and to the ways the Declaration’s universalist language was understood, from the beginning, to apply only selectively. Maier herself was forthright about the document’s failures on slavery, but subsequent scholarship has pushed further, examining how enslaved Americans heard the Declaration read aloud, and what they made of its promises.

The digital humanities have also transformed the study of documentary history. Full-text databases now make it possible to trace the circulation of specific phrases across the colonial declarations that Maier identified, and to map with greater precision the intellectual genealogy of Jefferson’s most famous lines. Her core argument – that the Declaration was a collective achievement rooted in a broader political conversation – has been strengthened, not weakened, by this subsequent work.

Why Read This Book in 2026

Because the Declaration of Independence is not a relic. It is a living political document, invoked almost daily in American public life, and the way we understand its origins shapes the way we understand its claims. If we believe Jefferson wrote it alone, in a flash of genius, we are likely to treat it as the property of a single tradition — as something handed down rather than fought over. If we understand it as Maier shows it to be — the product of a continent-wide argument, refined by a contentious committee, and given its ultimate meaning by generations of Americans who needed it to do new work – then it belongs to everyone who has ever invoked it. That is a more complicated story, and a more honest one. It is also, in its way, more inspiring: the Declaration is great not because one man was touched by lightning, but because a people, arguing and revising and disagreeing, managed to write something that outlasted them all.

American Scripture is the book that tells that story with the seriousness it deserves. In a series devoted to the architects of independence, Maier’s contribution is indispensable – not because she celebrates the founders, but because she shows us how democracy, even at its founding moment, looked a great deal like democracy: loud, imperfect, and stubbornly collective.

A Note on This Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.

You can find the entire series listing here.

The Foamy, Medicinal, Gloriously American Story of Root Beer

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There is a distinct, short-lived musical performance that occurs every time you drop a scoop of vanilla ice cream into a heavy glass mug of root beer. It begins with a sharp hiss, moves immediately into a frantic, crackling fizz, and culminates in a rich, silent crescendo of thick, tan foam creeping over the glass rim. If you are of a certain age, or if you simply possess a deep affection for the more eccentric corners of American culinary history, that sound is pure nostalgia.

With National Root Beer Day upon us, it felt like the perfect moment to pull a slender, delightfully specific volume off the shelf: The Root Beer Book: A Celebration of America’s Best-Loved Soft Drink by Laura E. Quarantiello.

Originally published in 1997, this 96-page appreciation is exactly the kind of book I love to discover. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet it treats its subject with the historical dignity that a century-and-a-half-old American staple deserves. Quarantiello unpacks the drink’s journey from indigenous herbal remedy to nineteenth-century temperance miracle, offering recipes, trivia, and a tour through the golden age of soda fountain culture.

My own deep affection for this beverage, however, goes beyond mere historical curiosity; it is rooted in a strange, 2-year-long sensory journey that began during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Like millions of others, I woke up one morning to find my world entirely muted. The virus had struck my olfactory system, leaving me with a profound and disorienting loss of taste and smell. Suddenly, Coke tasted like bitter water, Mountain Dew was disgusting, and favorite meals were reduced to mere textures.

The science behind this phenomenon is fascinating, if frustrating. The virus doesn’t actually destroy the taste buds on your tongue; instead, it attacks the sustentacular cells – the crucial support cells in the nasal cavity that protect and nurture our olfactory sensory neurons. When these cells are compromised, the brain loses its ability to process aroma. Because up to 80% of what we perceive as flavor actually comes from our sense of smell, losing this connection flattens the culinary world completely. For months, eating was a chore.

But then came the breakthrough. On a whim, I cracked open a cold bottle of craft root beer, and my palate suddenly woke up. It turns out there is a reason root beer can pierce through that post-viral fog when other foods fail. Unlike a cola or a fruit soda, which relies on a single dominant flavor profile, an authentic root beer is a botanical powerhouse. It hits multiple sensory receptors simultaneously. The sharp, cooling sensation of wintergreen and mint triggers the trigeminal nerve – the nerve responsible for detecting chemical cold and irritation – which bypasses the damaged olfactory support cells entirely. Combined with the deep, pungent bite of anise, the earthy sweetness of licorice, and the warm, distinct spice of real vanilla, root beer delivers an overwhelming, multi-layered sensory assault. It was the only thing that actually tasted good, launching me into a quest to track down and taste every classic, regional root beer formulation I could find as my senses slowly mended. Over the next 18 months, I tasted over 20 different brands of root beer from around the country.

From childhood memories of Frostie and A&W Root Beers to college favorite IBC Root Beer (courtesy of my Brownsville friends) to many more, I revisited regional and national brands. Key to the process was a local hardware store (Blackhawk Hardware in Charlotte) that carried many brands I had never heard of. Factor in the readily-available brands from all over the country via Amazon, and I was in root beer heaven.

Ultimately, Hank’s Gourmet Root Beer proved to be one of my favorites – but the journey was definitely fun, and all of them were better than soft drinks! After about two years, my taste slowly begin to come back, and now most things taste normal. But I still like root beer – especially with a burger or a hot dog or a cold root beer float on a hot summer day.

To understand root beer, you have to understand that it is essentially a forest in a glass. Unlike cola, which relies heavily on the citrusy, caffeinated notes of the kola nut and traditional spice oils, authentic root beer is an agricultural tapestry. Historically, it was brewed from whatever bark, roots, and berries could be foraged from the forest floor. Early colonial settlers looked at the wilderness and saw an apothecary. They gathered sassafras root, sarsaparilla, birch bark, dandelion, wintergreen, wild cherry bark, ginger, and juniper.

When these ingredients were boiled down, sweetened with molasses or honey, and fermented with a bit of yeast, the result was a bubbling, slightly alcoholic “small beer.” It was consumed not for luxury, but for survival; the brewing process made the water safe to drink, and the herbs offered a rustic shot of vitamins to hardy souls clearing the early frontier.

The man who transformed this colonial survival potion into a commercial empire was a Philadelphia pharmacist named Charles Elmer Hires. As Quarantiello recounts, Hires was on his honeymoon in New Jersey in the early 1870s when his landlady served him an exceptionally delicious, deeply flavorful herbal tea made from gathered roots. Being an enterprising pharmacist, Hires begged for the recipe, took it back to his laboratory, and began tinkering.

His original plan was to market the dry, powdered blend of sixteen roots, barks, and berries as “Hires’ Herb Tea.” He envisioned it as a dry mix that housewives could buy for a few cents, boil at home, and serve to their families as a wholesome, purifying health tonic.

Fortunately for us, Hires had a friend named Russell Conwell – the founder of Temple University – who possessed a keen eye for marketing. Conwell looked at the target audience of rugged Pennsylvania miners, laborers, and farmers and gave Hires a crucial piece of advice: “They won’t drink tea. Call it beer.”

It was a stroke of genius. Renamed “Hires Improved Root Beer,” the drink made its grand public debut at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Hires poured cold, foaming glasses of his concoction for fairgoers sweltering under the summer sun. It was an instant sensation. By positioning a completely non-alcoholic drink as a “beer,” Hires pulled off a spectacular marketing double-play. He won over the hard-working working class who wanted a robust, refreshing drink that felt like a beer, while simultaneously earning the passionate backing of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who hailed it as the ultimate alternative to the saloon.

Quarantiello’s book shines brightest when she dives into the sheer variety of the root beer landscape that followed Hires’ success. The market exploded with competitors, each tweaking the botanical balance to create a distinct regional identity.

Think about the modern survivors of that boom. A&W, born at a roadside stand in Lodi, California, in 1919 to welcome home returning World War I veterans, leans heavily on a smooth, creamy vanilla profile. It was designed to be served in frosted glass mugs kept in a freezer until the exact moment of pouring. Contrast that with Barq’s, which arrived out of Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1898. Edward Barq’s formulation was sharp, bitey, relied on sarsaparilla rather than traditional sassafras, and – crucially – included caffeine, making it a distinct outlier in the root beer world. Then you have IBC, founded in St. Louis during the height of Prohibition, offering a rich, dark, traditional flavor that felt so much like a premium beverage they packaged it in amber glass bottles resembling beer.

Reading through Quarantiello’s collection of recipes and home-brewing tips reminds us that root beer is a living piece of Americana. It survived the mid-twentieth century shift toward homogenized, mass-produced colas because it remained fiercely local. 30 years after her book was published, walking down the soda aisle, dropping in a local brewery, or visiting a local hardware store often reveals small-batch, regional root beers brewed with pure cane sugar and local water.

If you want to truly honor National Root Beer Day as a reader and a culinary enthusiast, skip the plastic two-liter bottles. Find a brand packaged in glass. Look for one that proudly lists real wintergreen, anise, or licorice on the label. Pour it deliberately into a heavy, chilled glass mug, watch the tan foam rise to a magnificent, trembling head, and take a sip of a beverage that was born in American forests, perfected in Philadelphia pharmacies, and served at roadside drive-ins across a changing continent.

It is sweet, sharp, complex, and entirely our own. Happy reading, and happy sipping!

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

The Man Who Signed Everything: Roger Sherman, the Indispensable Founder You’ve Never Heard Of

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Roger Sherman is the most neglected member of the Committee of Five, yet his practical judgment and steady influence shaped both the Declaration and the constitutional framework that followed. Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic by Mark David Hall gives this under-appreciated founder his due.

May and June – The Architects of Independence

In a season of political dysfunction – when compromise is treated as capitulation and pragmatism is confused with cowardice – it is worth pausing over a man whose entire career was built on the quiet genius of getting things done. Roger Sherman of Connecticut was not a gifted orator. He was not aristocratic, formally educated, or romantically tragic in the way that makes for compelling historical legend. He was a former shoemaker from rural Massachusetts who taught himself law, read theology by candlelight, and ultimately shaped more of the American founding than almost any figure whose name the average citizen cannot recall. Mark David Hall’s Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a determined and largely successful effort to correct this imbalance – and in doing so, it quietly reshapes how we ought to think about the entire founding generation.

The Author and His Argument

Hall is the Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University and a senior fellow at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, with a PhD in political science from the University of Virginia. He has spent his career at the intersection of religion, law, and early American political thought, and those preoccupations run through every chapter of this book. Hall is not a dispassionate observer. He writes with conviction about the role of Calvinist theology in the founding era, a role he believes has been systematically minimized by scholars more comfortable with Enlightenment rationalism than Reformed Christianity. Whether one shares that conviction or not, his case for Sherman’s importance stands largely on its own merits.

The book’s central argument is twofold. First, that Roger Sherman was one of the most consequential figures of the founding era, and that his obscurity today is not a reflection of his historical significance but rather an artifact of his personality – he rarely said the kinds of memorable, quotable things that fuel historical celebrity. Second, Hall argues that Sherman’s political thought was shaped at its core by Calvinist theology – by a conviction that human nature is fallen and corruptible, that government must therefore be structured to constrain power rather than concentrate it, and that liberty is not merely a secular political value but a sacred responsibility grounded in the duty of conscience before God.

That second argument is the more contested one, and it distinguishes this book from a simple rehabilitation biography. Hall is making a larger claim: that the Reformed Protestant tradition played a decisive and under-appreciated role in the founding generation’s resistance to British authority and in the institutional design that emerged from that resistance.

The Forgotten Man at the Center of Everything

The basic facts of Sherman’s life already constitute a remarkable American story. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1721, he received no formal education beyond what he absorbed from his father’s private library and the tutelage of a local clergyman. He worked as a shoemaker, then as a surveyor, then taught himself law and was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 1754. He entered politics, rose through the Connecticut General Assembly and Superior Court, and by the 1770s was one of the most respected legislators in the colony.

What happened next is almost structurally improbable. Sherman became the only founding figure to sign all four of the great state papers of the revolutionary era: the Continental Association (1774), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1777), and the Constitution (1787). No other founder achieved this. His contemporaries recognized it in real time. John Adams called him “that old Puritan, as honest as an angel, and as firm in the cause of American Independence as Mt. Atlas.” Patrick Henry, not easily impressed, said that Sherman and George Mason were “the greatest statesmen he ever knew.” Jefferson, who was often at odds with both Adams and Henry, pointed Sherman out to a visitor and remarked, “That is Mr. Sherman of Connecticut, a man who never said a foolish thing in his life.”

Hall reconstructs Sherman’s path to the Declaration with careful attention to what preceded it. In 1765, as the Stamp Act crisis inflamed the colonies, Sherman led a Connecticut Assembly committee in drafting a list of grievances against the Crown. His position then was already characteristically principled and clear: Parliament had no authority to tax the colonies without their consent. More strikingly, Sherman went further than many of his contemporaries, arguing that Parliament lacked the authority to regulate the colonies at all. “No laws bind the people but such as they consent to be governed by,” he wrote to Thomas Cushing – a formulation that anticipates the Declaration’s logic by more than a decade.

When the Committee of Five was appointed in June 1776 to draft the Declaration of Independence – joining Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Robert Livingston – Sherman was not chosen as a token participant or a regional placeholder. He had already demonstrated, through years of congressional service, that he possessed what Hall calls “practical judgment”: the ability to discern what was politically achievable, to navigate competing interests, and to keep complex deliberations moving toward resolution. In 1776 alone, Sherman was the only delegate to serve simultaneously on all three of the most important congressional committees: the Committee of Five drafting the Declaration, the Board of War, and the committee drafting what would become the Articles of Confederation. He was, by any measure, indispensable. In the image below, Sherman is the second from left.

The Calvinist Founder

Hall’s most provocative contribution is his sustained argument that Sherman’s politics were not merely influenced by his faith but were logically derived from it. Sherman was a devout Calvinist – a congregationalist in the orthodox New England tradition – and Hall contends that this shaped his institutional instincts in ways that secular political theory alone cannot explain.

The Reformed tradition, as Hall presents it, held that human beings were fundamentally fallen and that political institutions must therefore be designed to resist the natural human tendency toward corruption, tyranny, and self-aggrandizement. This was not pessimism; it was anthropology with political consequences. Government could not rely on the virtue of its leaders – it had to be structured to contain vice. This conviction, Hall argues, expressed itself in Sherman’s consistent preference for divided power, legislative supremacy over executive authority, and the protection of state-level government against centralization. Sherman once observed that a large, complicated national government was contrary to “the true spirit and genius of republican government,” which should be “small and simple.” Whether one reads this as Calvinist theology or classical republicanism or simply the common sense of a man who had watched powerful institutions abuse their authority, the instinct proved prophetic.

Hall does not claim that Sherman was the only Calvinist among the founders, or even the most theologically sophisticated. His broader point – that the Reformed tradition shaped the founding in ways historians trained in Enlightenment frameworks have systematically overlooked – is a genuine scholarly corrective, even if some readers will find it overstated. The secondary literature on the founding tends to foreground figures like Jefferson and Madison, whose intellectual debts to Locke, Montesquieu, and the Scottish Enlightenment are well documented. Sherman represents a different tradition, one more rooted in the Puritan inheritance of New England, and Hall is right that it deserves fuller treatment.

After the Signing: A Man Who Would Not Stop

The months following the signing of the Declaration of Independence in August 1776 found Sherman doing exactly what one might expect of him: working. While the war that the Declaration made official raged on multiple fronts, Sherman remained embedded in the machinery of Congress, attending to the unglamorous but essential work of sustaining a revolution in progress.

He served simultaneously on the Board of War – helping manage the logistics, supply chains, and strategic coordination of the Continental Army – and on the committee drafting the Articles of Confederation, the document that would serve as the new nation’s first constitution. His three eldest sons served as officers in the Continental Army during this period, adding personal stakes to the public ones. The war hurt Sherman financially; several of his business enterprises collapsed under the strains of revolution, and he supported a large family on a legislator’s uncertain income. Yet he continued to serve.

From 1777 to 1779, he simultaneously held his congressional seat and served on Connecticut’s Council of Safety, the wartime executive committee responsible for coordinating the state’s military and civilian response to the conflict. He attended conventions of the New England states in 1777 to weigh in on taxation and currency, and participated in the New Haven Convention on Prices in 1778. He remained a member of the Continental Congress for the duration of the Revolutionary War, and in 1783 – still not finished – he and colleague Richard Law spent five months revising all of Connecticut’s statutory laws, including the passage of a gradual emancipation act for children born to enslaved people in the state after March 1784. He was, to borrow a phrase, always still in the room.

In Dialogue with the Series

Placed alongside the other books in this section of Booked for the Revolution, Hall’s study performs a distinct and necessary function. Where Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters illuminates the cultural and intellectual world of the founders as a class, and where Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers traces the personal dynamics between the famous few, Hall zooms in on a figure whom both books, in their different ways, would likely relegate to the margins. Sherman is not a character who fits the template of the Romantic founder – he had no Hamilton-esque fatal glamour, no Jeffersonian philosophical grandeur, no Franklinian wit.

Pauline Maier’s American Scripture, which appears next in this series, offers the most direct complement to Hall’s argument. Where Maier demonstrates that the Declaration was a collective achievement – shaped by Congress’s editorial interventions as much as by Jefferson’s original draft – Hall prepares the ground for that argument by showing us who was actually in the room doing the work. Sherman is precisely the kind of figure whose quiet, unglamorous contributions get erased when we tell the story through the lens of individual genius. David McCullough’s John Adams portrays Adams as the driving force behind Jefferson’s appointment and independence’s passage – and that portrait is not wrong. But Hall’s Sherman reminds us that the engine Adams was driving had many other moving parts.

Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power engages with Jefferson’s moral complexity in ways that Hall does not attempt with Sherman. Sherman’s moral world was less internally conflicted – his faith and his politics reinforced each other rather than colliding, as Jefferson’s did constantly. But both books are ultimately asking the same question: What ideas animated these men? Hall’s answer – Calvinist theology, tempered by practical wisdom – is less glamorous than Meacham’s portrait of Jefferson’s classical republicanism, but it may be no less accurate.

What We Have Learned Since 2013

Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic appeared at a moment of renewed scholarly interest in the relationship between religion and the American founding, and that conversation has continued to develop. Subsequent work on the Reformed and Puritan inheritance of New England political thought has largely confirmed Hall’s instinct that this tradition was more formative than mid-twentieth-century secular historiography acknowledged. Scholars like Daniel Walker Howe had already been making related arguments about evangelical and Reformed influences on American political culture, and that line of inquiry has grown more sophisticated in the decade since Hall wrote.

On the specific question of Sherman’s place in the founding, Hall’s rehabilitation has found an appreciative audience among constitutional scholars, particularly those interested in the origins of federalism and the structure of legislative power. Sherman’s Connecticut Compromise – the bicameral legislature with proportional representation in the House and equal state representation in the Senate – is now more widely recognized as one of the most consequential structural decisions in American constitutional history, and appreciation of Sherman’s role in it has grown accordingly.

What remains genuinely open is the degree to which Calvinist theology, as opposed to overlapping currents of classical republicanism and common law tradition, was causally decisive in shaping Sherman’s specific political positions. Hall acknowledges the methodological difficulty here – disentangling theological from secular influences in a figure who read both Calvin and Montesquieu – without fully resolving it. That is a limitation of the argument, though perhaps an honest one.

Why Read This in 2026

There is an obvious contemporary resonance in the story of a man who built a political career on compromise, consensus, and institutional trust rather than on personal charisma or ideological purity. Sherman’s virtues – steady industry, moral consistency, a preference for durable structures over brilliant individual solutions – are not the virtues that our current political culture celebrates. But they are, arguably, the virtues that built the republic.

Hall’s book is also, at roughly 200 pages, genuinely readable. It is neither a doorstop biography nor a dense theoretical treatise. It is a focused, well-argued intellectual portrait of a neglected founder, written by a scholar who clearly believes that what he is recovering matters — and who makes a persuasive case that it does. Whether or not one accepts every dimension of Hall’s theological argument, the historical rehabilitation at the book’s center is both warranted and well executed.

To read this book in the context of this series is to see the Declaration of Independence differently: not as a monument erected by a handful of visionary geniuses, but as the outcome of a long, difficult, contentious process in which many people – including one hardworking cobbler’s son from Connecticut – did the indispensable, unremarkable, essential work of getting a new nation into being.

A Note on This Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.

You can find the entire series listing here.

Beyond the Bunting

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Reclaiming the American Narrative

The machinery of American commemoration is running at full speed, and it is not pretty. Coffee mugs, lawn chairs, car insurance campaigns – all of it draped in red, white, and blue, stamped with some variation of a “250” logo.

That the country’s 250th birthday would generate commercial noise was never in doubt. What stings is the scale of it, the way the actual event – a group of men in Philadelphia signing a document that could have gotten them hanged – gets buried under promotional codes and pop-up advertisements. If you’re looking for something more than that, you have to step away from the marketplace entirely.

The place to go is the historians. Not all of them – but the ones who spent their careers thinking hard about what this country actually is, warts and self-correction included. David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose are two of the obvious candidates, and three of their books in particular speak directly to this moment: Ambrose’s final work, To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (2002), and McCullough’s The American Spirit (2017) and the posthumous History Matters (2025). Read together, they form something more useful than a reading list. They form a rebuttal.

Two Historians, Two Very Different Urgencies

Ambrose wrote To America knowing he was dying. He completed it just before his death in October 2002, in the shadow of September 11, when the country was still sorting through its grief and its anger. That context matters. He wasn’t writing a textbook or a legacy project – he was writing a confession. Having spent decades in the archives of World War II and the Lewis and Clark expedition, he had developed a clear-eyed, sometimes painful sense of what America had done well and what it had willfully refused to do. This book was his chance to say it plainly, without the apparatus of academic argument.

McCullough’s situation was different. He published The American Spirit in 2017, watching the country fragment in ways that alarmed him. A two-time Pulitzer winner, he had earned the status of the nation’s go-to narrator – the voice people trusted to explain the founding generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wright Brothers. But what he kept encountering, in classrooms and public life alike, was a creeping historical amnesia. The American Spirit collected his best speeches – talks given at universities, historic sites, and before Congress – as a kind of intervention. History Matters appeared three years after his death in 2022, assembled by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and long-time researcher Michael Hill, with a foreword by Jon Meacham. It brings together previously unpublished essays that show how McCullough’s thinking developed over decades. The two volumes, read alongside Ambrose, make a complete picture.

What They’re Actually Arguing

The surface agreement between these writers is easy to summarize: America is neither the paradise its boosters claim nor the irredeemable project its critics insist upon. It’s something harder to hold – a country founded on promises its founders couldn’t keep, which subsequent generations have been, fitfully and incompletely, trying to honor ever since. But the surface agreement conceals real differences in emphasis.

Ambrose’s core argument is about the gap. The founders wrote magnificent things – Jefferson’s declaration of human equality is, by any measure, one of the most radical sentences in political history – and then failed to live by them. Slavery. The expulsion of Native Americans. The long exclusion of women from civic life. For Ambrose, these aren’t embarrassing footnotes. They’re the central drama. The true American story is the multi-generational attempt to close the distance between what the country proclaimed and what it actually did.

McCullough’s argument in The American Spirit is more temperamentally optimistic, focused less on the gap and more on the human qualities that have, at crucial moments, narrowed it. Curiosity. Cooperative effort. The refusal to accept that circumstances are fixed. He pushes back hard against the idea that history moves by impersonal forces – his consistent position is that individuals, acting from character, shape outcomes. History Matters deepens this into something more pedagogical: the case that historical literacy isn’t optional for citizens, that it provides the only reliable antidote to the kind of shallow, ahistorical cynicism that makes genuine democratic participation impossible.

The Passages That Stay With You

Ambrose writes the way a trusted professor talks – direct, unpretentious, willing to state the uncomfortable thing without dressing it up. On the central paradox of the founding, he wrote:

We are a people who have achieved much, but we have also sinned much. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were progressive thinkers who lived a profound contradiction… They gave the world a model of democracy while practicing the ultimate tyranny of human bondage. Our history is the story of trying to live up to the words they wrote, a journey that is far from over.

That last clause is doing a lot of work. It refuses both the triumphalist reading and the despairing one. The journey isn’t over – which means it’s still ours to continue or abandon.

McCullough operates on a different register. His prose has a symphonic quality, built for public delivery, designed to stir rather than prod. In The American Spirit, speaking to a graduating class, he offered a warning:

History is a spacious country of the mind, and if you do not know your own history, you are like a leaf that doesn’t know it’s part of a tree. We must remember that our founders were not gods; they were human beings, flawed and uncertain, yet they achieved something miraculous because they possessed a sense of purpose larger than themselves. If we lose that sense of purpose, if we become a nation of spectators rather than participants, our democracy will wither from within.

The leaf metaphor is the kind of thing that sounds obvious until you sit with it. And the distinction between spectators and participants is where his argument gets genuinely sharp – democracy doesn’t run on sentiment. It runs on people who show up. In History Matters, McCullough’s voice becomes quieter, more reflective, less oratorical:

Real history is never just about politics or war; it is about the human heart, about character, about the books people read and the art they created. When we look at Harry Truman or George Washington, we are looking at men whose strength came from an old-fashioned adherence to honor, honesty, and hard work. History matters because it reminds us, in the darkest of times, that we have been through worse, and that decent, determined people can prevail.

Where They Agree and Where They Diverge

Both men are categorically opposed to the twin temptations of American historical thinking: the whitewash that erases genuine national sins, and the overcorrection that reduces the entire story to an indictment. Both hold pride and repentance in tension, and both treat human character as the hinge on which history turns. Whether Ambrose is writing about a nineteen-year-old at Omaha Beach or McCullough is tracing John Adams’s obstinate integrity, the argument is the same: what people do, and why they do it, is what history actually is.

But their temperaments differ, and so do their methods. Ambrose is grittier, more political, more attuned to friction. He’s interested in military strategy, in the mechanics of presidential power, in how Eisenhower differed from Nixon and why it mattered. His work has the texture of investigative journalism – he went to the archives and to the veterans themselves, and it shows. McCullough is more interested in culture: painting, architecture, education, the intellectual habits that shape a civilization. He’ll spend as much time on Thomas Eakins or the engineering of the Brooklyn Bridge as on any political figure.

History Matters also gives us something the other books don’t – a view of McCullough’s own formation. His childhood in Pittsburgh, his early mentors, his lifelong attachment to literature and visual art. It’s the backstage pass to the grand claims made in his other works, and it makes those claims more convincing, not less.

Why Read These Books Now

The obvious answer is that these books offer a corrective to the 250th anniversary spectacle. They replace cheap patriotism with the demanding, rewarding kind that requires actually knowing something.

But there’s a more specific case for each of them. Ambrose’s To America is a reality check. It prevents the comfortable nostalgia that imagines the past as simpler or purer than the present. Every generation, he insists, faced catastrophic challenges and internal divisions – and the question each generation had to answer was whether it would do better than the one before. Reading him turns you from a passive consumer of national mythology into something more useful: someone who knows what the mythology is covering up and why it matters.

McCullough’s American Spirit and History Matters perform the complementary service. Against the grinding cynicism that makes civic participation feel pointless, he makes the case for hope – not the greeting-card kind, but the documented kind, grounded in specific people who faced genuinely terrible circumstances and figured something out. The American track record of innovation, resilience, and moral course-correction is real. It doesn’t erase the failures, but it means the failures aren’t the whole story.

When the fireworks go up this summer, the question worth asking isn’t whether the commercialism is crass – it obviously is. The question is what you actually think you’re celebrating. The Declaration of Independence was not a marketing milestone. It was a radical, dangerous act by people who knew it might get them killed. Ambrose and McCullough, each in his own way, help you hold that reality in your mind while the lawn chairs and insurance jingles try their best to crowd it out.

That’s not a small thing.

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

The Man Who Lit the Fuse: Richard Henry Lee

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Richard Henry Lee’s resolution of June 7, 1776 was the direct legislative trigger for the appointment of the drafting committee, making him the political architect behind the Declaration’s creation. This biography restores his pivotal but often overlooked role.

May and June – The Architects of Independence, Part Six

The Forgotten Architect

On June 7, 1776, a Virginia delegate rose before the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia and spoke words that would split the world in two. “Resolved,” Richard Henry Lee declared, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” The motion was not debate-provoking – it was destiny-announcing. Within weeks, a committee had been appointed, a document drafted, and the most consequential declaration in the history of democratic governance was taking shape. And yet, when Americans picture the founding moment, Lee’s face rarely appears in the frame.

J. Kent McGaughy’s biography, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary, published in 2004, is a deliberate corrective to that omission — and a reminder, particularly urgent in 2026, that history’s most transformative moments are rarely the product of a single heroic individual. They depend on those who do the essential, unglamorous work of legislative architecture: the politicians who know how to move a body, how to frame a resolution, and when to strike.

The Author and His Purpose

McGaughy, a historian whose scholarly focus centers on the political culture of eighteenth-century Virginia, brings to this biography both the rigor of archival research and an evident frustration with how the founding narrative has been written. His purpose, stated plainly in his introduction, is restorative rather than revisionist. He does not argue that Lee was secretly more important than Jefferson or Adams. He argues, more usefully, that we have been asking the wrong question – focusing so heavily on who wrote the Declaration that we have forgotten who made it possible for a declaration to be written at all.

The biography draws on Lee’s extensive correspondence, his speeches in Congress, and the political networks of colonial Virginia to reconstruct a figure who was, in many ways, the connective tissue of the revolutionary movement. McGaughy’s approach is methodical and scholarly rather than cinematic, but his subject rewards the attention. Lee was not a man of dramatic gestures; he was a man of patient, relentless political work, and McGaughy is at his best when showing how that work accumulated into historical consequence.

The Central Argument

McGaughy’s core interpretation is straightforward but important: Richard Henry Lee was the political architect of independence in a way that no other founder was. Jefferson provided the language. Adams provided the passion. Franklin provided the credibility. But Lee provided the mechanism – the formal legislative trigger without which none of those contributions would have had a vehicle.

The resolution Lee introduced on June 7, 1776, was not spontaneous. McGaughy traces the months of careful coalition-building that preceded it, the correspondence Lee maintained with Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and other firebrands across the colonies, and the precise political calculation involved in timing the resolution’s introduction. Lee understood that independence required not just sentiment but procedure – that the Continental Congress needed a formal motion to act upon, and that the motion needed to come at a moment when enough delegates were ready to support it, or at least not block it.

McGaughy also rehabilitates Lee’s role in the broader revolutionary period, showing that his advocacy for a bill of rights and his deep suspicion of centralized power were not peripheral concerns but central to the political philosophy that shaped the founding. Lee was a committed republican in the classical sense – wary of executive overreach, committed to the sovereignty of deliberative bodies, and insistent that liberty required structural protections, not merely declarations of principle.

The Months That Followed

The signing of the Declaration on August 2, 1776, did not mark a pause in Lee’s revolutionary activity – it accelerated it. In the months immediately following, Lee remained one of the most active and influential figures in the Continental Congress, even as illness – a recurring affliction that dogged him throughout his life – periodically forced him from Philadelphia.

Lee was deeply involved in the effort to establish foreign alliances, particularly with France, which he understood to be essential to the military survival of the new nation. He corresponded extensively with Arthur Lee, his brother stationed in Europe, coordinating intelligence and diplomatic strategy. He also turned his considerable legislative energy toward the Articles of Confederation, the framework for national governance that would occupy Congress through 1777. True to form, Lee pushed for provisions that protected state sovereignty and checked the accumulation of central power – positions that placed him in tension with some of his fellow founders but were deeply consistent with the Virginia political tradition he embodied.

His physical absences from Congress during this period were not retreats; they were filled with organizing, writing, and lobbying from Virginia, ensuring that his state’s considerable weight remained aligned with the revolutionary cause. Lee returned to active Congressional service repeatedly, understanding that independence declared was not independence secured, and that the legislative work of building a functioning republic was as urgent as the military work of defending one.

The Voice on the Page

McGaughy’s scholarly prose occasionally gives way to passages that capture the particular electricity of Lee’s political world. Describing Lee’s position in the weeks before his June resolution, McGaughy writes with real compression and force: Lee had spent the better part of a decade preparing his colleagues for a vote they had not yet admitted they were willing to take. The resolution was not a leap – it was the last step of a very long walk.

On Lee’s deep commitment to a formal declaration of rights, McGaughy is equally pointed, noting that for Lee, the Declaration of Independence without a subsequent bill of rights was an incomplete document – a statement of freedom that left the mechanisms of freedom dangerously undefined. This premonition, of course, proved prescient: the absence of enumerated rights from the original Constitution would become the central political controversy of the ratification debates a decade later.

McGaughy also captures the particular frustration that animated Lee’s later career – the sense that the Revolution’s promise was being slowly, institutionally diluted by the very men who had helped make it. Lee’s anti-federalism was not reactionary nostalgia. It was, McGaughy argues, the logical extension of the same political principles that had made him a revolutionary in the first place.

In Dialogue with the Series

Read alongside the other books in The Architects of Independence, McGaughy’s biography of Lee performs an essential function: it insists that the Declaration was a legislative achievement before it was a literary one.

Pauline Maier’s American Scripture, the cornerstone of this reading series, makes a complementary argument – that Congress, not Jefferson, was the true author of the final Declaration, having revised and sharpened Jefferson’s draft through collective deliberation. McGaughy arrives at a similar conclusion by a different path, showing that even before the committee sat down to write, a politician had to construct the conditions under which writing could occur. Maier and McGaughy together produce a fully democratic account of the Declaration’s origins: one man built the legislative pathway; one body walked it.

McGaughy is also in productive tension with David McCullough’s John Adams. McCullough’s biography gives Adams enormous credit – perhaps the most of any individual – for driving the independence movement forward in Congress. McGaughy does not dispute Adams’s passion or his indispensability. But he subtly rebalances the ledger, suggesting that Adams’s role was primarily that of advocate and debater, while Lee’s was that of legislative strategist. A motion needs a champion, but it first needs a motion, and that motion needed its author.

Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers provides yet another useful counterpoint. Ellis is drawn to the dramatic relationships – the rivalries, the reconciliations, the letters between giants. Lee appears at the margins of Ellis’s account, which is precisely McGaughy’s point: the founders who worked through formal legislative structures rather than through personal drama have been systematically undervalued by a historiography that prizes charisma over procedure.

What We Have Learned Since 2004

McGaughy’s biography appeared before the most recent wave of scholarship on the founding era’s contradictions – particularly regarding slavery. Lee himself owned enslaved people throughout his life, and his revolutionary rhetoric about liberty existed in the same dissonant space as Jefferson’s and Washington’s. McGaughy addresses this tension, but the two decades of scholarship since publication – including work by historians like Woody Holton and Edward Baptist on the political economy of the slaveholding founders – have sharpened the analytical tools available for understanding how men like Lee could hold simultaneously a philosophy of universal liberty and a practice of human bondage.

More recent digital history projects have also expanded access to Lee’s correspondence, allowing scholars to trace his political networks with greater precision than McGaughy could in 2004. The picture that emerges from this subsequent work is largely consistent with McGaughy’s portrait, but richer in texture – Lee’s coalition-building appears even more sophisticated, and his role in coordinating the inter-colonial correspondence networks even more central, than the biography fully conveys.

Why Read This in 2026

There is a particular kind of political figure – essential to every democratic movement but rarely celebrated by it – who understands that ideas require mechanisms. That liberty requires not just a declaration but a procedure, a motion, a vote, a structure. Richard Henry Lee was that figure in 1776, and McGaughy’s biography is a sustained meditation on why such figures matter.

In a political moment when democratic institutions are once again under pressure, when the gap between principled rhetoric and structural reality feels especially wide, Lee’s story carries genuine contemporary force. The Declaration of Independence was not conjured by a lone genius into a vacuum. It required someone who understood how power actually moves through a deliberative body – who knew how to frame a resolution, when to introduce it, and how to build the fragile legislative coalition that would carry it forward.

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia is not the most thrilling book in this reading series. It does not have the biographical sweep of Chernow’s Washington or the narrative propulsion of McCullough’s Adams. But it is, in its own way, the most politically instructive – a reminder that revolutions are not made by declarations alone. They are made by the patient, strategic work of people who understand the machinery of democracy and how to make it move.

A Note on This Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.

You can find the entire series listing here.

Glazed, Frosted, and Sprinkled: Getting Ready for National Donut Day

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Though I certainly enjoyed donuts throughout my childhood, a single book is responsible for the fondness I have for them as an adult.

Books will do that to you.

Like many things in my life, this fondness all came about because of a book: Homer Price.  I have great memories of reading one of the stories in the book about Homer and Uncle Ulysses and the automatic doughnut machine.

 I remembered the image of doughnuts stacked on the counter, shelves, and stools with more coming out of the machine every minute.

I didn’t realize at the time how a book about donuts could be linked to so much more in life.

THE DOUGHNUTS takes place in the 1940’s when an uncle of a boy named Homer opens a luncheonette. Uncle Ulysses, much to the chagrin of his wife Agnes, is a man fond of new-fangled gadgets and has installed a doughnut making machine in his restaurant.

One evening, while Homer is visiting his uncle’s restaurant, Uncle Ulysses leaves Homer in charge of putting the finishing touches on the doughnut machine while he stops by the barber shop. Homer works on the machine and is soon visited by an “advertising man” who stops by for coffee and a doughnut.

While the man waits for the doughnut machine to begin working, a wealthy woman enters the restaurant. She asks Homer if she can mix up the doughnut batter for him, takes off her diamond bracelet, and sets to work. 

Soon the doughnut machine is working – too well! Homer cannot stop the doughnuts from popping out of the machine! Her job finished, the woman leaves and Homer and the advertising man look for places to store the doughnuts.

Homer and the man put their heads together and come up with a scheme to sell the doughnuts “2 for 5 cents” in order to be rid of them. Eventually, the wealthy woman returns, claiming to have left her bracelet in the restaurant.

Shortly, it becomes evident that the bracelet must be in one of the thousands of doughnuts. Homer has an idea! He makes a sign offering one hundred dollars for anyone who can find the bracelet. It doesn’t take long for the doughnuts to be gobbled up and the bracelet to be found.

The end of the story finds Uncle Ulysses trying to explain to skeptical Aunt Agnes why there are tons of crumbs from dozens of doughnuts left on the restaurant counter!

Trivia Note: Have you ever seen the short film The Doughnuts, based on the story above?

As I recall, the copy of Homer Price I had as a boy came from that wonderful invention designed to sell books to eager young readers like me: the Scholastic Book Fair. Not only could I order books, but our classroom benefited too by receiving books for our in-room library. Sadly, many years later when my kids were in elementary school, the Book Fair was less focused on books and more on junk. That’s another story for another time.

What’s the big deal with a child’s book published in 1943, read by a first grade teacher to her class in 1964, bought by a second grader as soon as he could in 1965, and fondly remembered over sixty years later?

Regular readers of this website know that reading and books are a big deal to me. Introduced by my schoolteacher mother, encouraged by my daily reader father, and nurtured over the years by teachers and professors, it’s not too far off the mark to say these images explain the big deal about reading:

Books have the power to ignite the imagination and foster creativity in children. This imaginative capacity can carry over into adulthood, allowing individuals to approach challenges with creative problem-solving skills and innovative thinking. Seeing this image, and reading about Homer’s dilemma and ultimate solution planted a seed in me: sometimes the best way out of a jam is to sit and think first, and then act on the solution that comes to you.

Reading from an early age has been linked to improved cognitive abilities, such as better language skills, broader vocabulary, enhanced critical thinking, and stronger analytical capabilities. These cognitive benefits persist into adulthood, enabling individuals to process information more effectively and think more critically. Putting together a disassembled donut machine, then making it work so well that Homer had to come up with an idea to get rid of all those donuts – that’s critical thinking!

Children who cultivate a love for reading at an early age are more likely to maintain a curiosity and thirst for knowledge throughout their lives. Books become a gateway to continuously learning new things, exploring different perspectives, and expanding their horizons. Homer’s curiosity got him into the problem, and willingness to continue thinking got him out of it.

I could go on, but I hope you get the point: While not everyone who loved reading as a child maintains that passion into adulthood, those who do often find that their early love of books has profoundly shaped their intellectual, emotional, and personal development in enduring ways.

All from a child’s book about a runaway donut machine…

…which is where I now hope to make the connection for you!

It’s that time of year again when the sweet, doughy aroma of fresh donuts fills the air and Americans come together to honor one of the nation’s most beloved breakfast treats. Friday, June 5th marks National Donut Day 2026, a delicious holiday that pays homage to the humble yet iconic donut. This is an annual recognition, falling on the first Friday of June each year.

With roots tracing back to World War I, when Salvation Army “Lassies” fried donuts in soldiers’ helmets as a morale-boosting treat, National Donut Day has become an annual tradition that transcends generations. This year’s celebration promises to be even sweeter, with donut shops and bakeries across the country rolling out their finest creations to mark the occasion.

From the classic glazed to the creative cronut, the donut landscape has evolved dramatically over the decades, reflecting the changing tastes and culinary adventurousness of American consumers. Gourmet donut boutiques have taken the humble pastry to new heights, adorning them with artisanal ingredients like small-batch jams, craft chocolates, and hand-torched meringues.

At the same time, the nostalgia for simpler pleasures remains strong, with long lines still forming at old-fashioned donut counters for pillowy yeast-raised rings and sugar-dusted cake donuts. After all, there’s something undeniably comforting about biting into a fresh, warm donut that instantly transports you back to childhood.

There are several reasons why donuts have become such a beloved and popular food in American culture:

  • Convenience and portability: Donuts are easy to eat on-the-go, making them a convenient breakfast or snack option for people with busy lifestyles.
  • Nostalgia and comfort food: Donuts evoke a sense of nostalgia and comfort for many Americans, reminding them of childhood memories, family gatherings, or neighborhood donut shops.
  • Variety and customization: Donuts come in an endless array of flavors, glazes, toppings, and fillings, allowing for personalization and catering to diverse tastes.
  • Indulgence and treat: Donuts are often seen as an indulgent treat or reward, satisfying cravings for something sweet and decadent.
  • Cultural significance: Donuts have become deeply ingrained in American culture, with events like National Donut Day and the association with coffee breaks and diners.
  • Accessibility and affordability: Donuts are widely available and relatively inexpensive, making them an accessible indulgence for people from various socioeconomic backgrounds.
  • Marketing and branding: Major donut chains like Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme have successfully marketed and branded their products, contributing to the popularity of donuts.
  • Versatility: Donuts can be enjoyed at any time of day, from breakfast to dessert, and can be served on various occasions, from casual gatherings to special events.

The combination of convenience, indulgence, nostalgia, variety, and cultural significance has made donuts a quintessential American food that appeals to a broad range of consumers and has become deeply embedded in the country’s culinary landscape.

This year, celebrate National Donut Day by indulging in your favorite fried confection, whether it’s an old reliable or an Instagram-worthy gourmet creation. Share one with a loved one over a steaming cup of coffee, or treat your office mates to a box of assorted delights.

However you choose to commemorate the occasion, take a moment to appreciate the humble donut and its rich place in American culture and history. From the battlefields of World War I to the modern artisanal bakeries, the donut has proven its enduring appeal and cemented its status as an iconic American comfort food.

So grab a napkin and prepare to get deliciously sticky – it’s almost National Donut Day, and the only acceptable response is to treat yourself to a sugary, doughy delight – and a good book!

The rings of batter kept right on dropping into the hot fat, and the automatic gadget kept right on turning them over, and the other automatic gadget kept right on giving them a little push, and the doughnuts kept right on rolling down the little chute just as regular as a clock can tick – they just kept right on a comin’, an’ a comin’, an’ a comin’, an’ a comin’.

Uncle Ulysses

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

The Philosopher Who Played Politics: Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence

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As the Declaration of Independence’s principal author, Jefferson’s inclusion in this series is essential. Jon Meacham’s biography goes beyond historical bias to examine the political genius and moral complexity of the man who gave the Declaration its enduring voice.

April and May – The Architects of Independence, Part Five

He Didn’t Want the Assignment

In the summer of 1776, as Philadelphia baked in the June heat, a thirty-three-year-old Virginia lawyer sat alone in a rented parlor on Market Street and attempted the most consequential act of writing in American history. Thomas Jefferson had not wanted the assignment. He was homesick, worried about his ailing wife Martha back in Monticello, and eager to return to Virginia, where he believed the real revolutionary work – building a new state government from scratch – was being done without him. Yet there he sat, composing a document that would not merely justify a colonial rebellion, but articulate a vision of human equality that would outlast him by centuries, that would be invoked by Frederick Douglass, echoed by Ho Chi Minh, and challenged, tested, and betrayed in ways Jefferson could never have imagined.

That tension – between the soaring idealism of Jefferson’s words and the often messy, self-interested, morally compromised reality of his life – is precisely the subject Jon Meacham sets out to illuminate in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012). In an era when political leaders are simultaneously celebrated and diminished in real time, when the gap between rhetoric and action is a source of endless public despair, Meacham’s portrait of history’s most contradictory founding father carries an uncomfortable and urgent resonance.

The Author and His Argument

Jon Meacham is no academic provocateur. A Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who previously chronicled Andrew Jackson and later Abraham Lincoln and George H.W. Bush, Meacham writes biography as narrative – accessible, propulsive, and attuned to the emotional texture of its subjects’ lives. His fifth book at time of publication, The Art of Power is the most widely-read Jefferson biography available today – well-written and fast-paced, entertaining and enjoyable, requiring little patience or fortitude on the part of the reader.

But Meacham’s accessibility masks a serious central thesis. His core argument is announced in his title and prosecuted on every page: that Jefferson’s genius was not merely philosophical but profoundly political. As Meacham puts it, “Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.” This is a Jefferson who is not the marble monument of the Jefferson Memorial, but a flesh-and-blood operator – shrewd, calculating, contradiction-tolerating, and above all, effective.

Meacham shows how Jefferson’s deft ability to compromise and improvise made him a transformational leader. We think of Jefferson as the embodiment of noble ideals, as he was, but Meacham shows that he was a practical politician more than a moral theorist. Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France, including unpublished transcripts from Jefferson’s presidential papers, Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all American history – a leader who found the means to endure and to win, whose story resonates today not least because he led his nation through ferocious partisanship amid economic change and external threats.

The Making of the Declaration

Meacham’s account of Jefferson’s role in drafting the Declaration of Independence cuts against two persistent myths: that Jefferson was a lone genius working in inspired isolation, and that the Congress merely rubber-stamped his prose. The truth, as Meacham renders it, was far more collaborative and politically fraught.

On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress selected Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to draft a declaration of independence. Knowing Jefferson’s prowess with a pen, Adams urged him to author the first draft, which was then carefully revised by Adams and Franklin before being given to Congress for review on June 28.

Jefferson drafted the document in roughly seventeen days, working from his own prior writings, George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, and a deep immersion in Enlightenment philosophy – particularly the natural-rights theories of John Locke. Drawing on documents such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights, state and local calls for independence, and his own draft of a Virginia constitution, Jefferson wrote a stunning statement of the colonists’ right to rebel against the British government, establishing their argument on the premise that all men are created equal and have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What happened next was politically bruising. Congress stripped roughly a quarter of Jefferson’s original text, including his entire passage condemning the slave trade – a deletion that haunted Jefferson for the rest of his life and that Meacham treats as both a political necessity and a moral catastrophe. Among the rejected passages were a critical reference to the English people and, crucially, a denunciation of the slave trade and of slavery itself. Jefferson seethed at these changes but held his tongue – a display of the political discipline Meacham identifies as central to his character.

Interestingly, one of Jefferson’s most famous phrases came close to being something far less memorable. Jefferson first wrote “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” In the rough draft, the words “sacred and undeniable” were crossed out and “self-evident” written in above the line. Whether that revision was Jefferson’s own second thought or Benjamin Franklin or John Adams’s editorial hand remains a subject of scholarly debate – a small detail that opens a window onto the extraordinary collaborative pressures at work in that Philadelphia room.

Immediately Afterwards: The Revolutionary Governor

By the summer of 1776, Jefferson was seeking to be relieved from congressional service, a principal reason being his desire to be near his ailing wife. He returned to Monticello in September and plunged immediately back into Virginia politics, working closely with James Madison as a member of the new House of Delegates. Their first collaboration – to end the religious establishment in Virginia – became a legislative battle that would culminate with the passage of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.

He was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates for Albemarle County in September 1776, when finalizing the state constitution was a priority. For nearly three years, Jefferson assisted with the constitution and was especially proud of his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.

Then, in the spring of 1779, came a new challenge that would test Jefferson’s limits as a leader. Jefferson was only thirty-six years old when he became governor, but he brought a diverse array of experience to the position. His two terms would prove to be the most turbulent and personally damaging years of his public life. His tenure was dominated by repeated British invasions of Virginia during the Revolution. Hampering his efforts to respond was the state constitution, which had relegated little power to the state’s chief executive. Faced with calls to provide the struggling Continental army with troops and the need to reinforce the militia against possible invasion, Jefferson presided over draft lotteries that were met with stiff resistance.

When Benedict Arnold raided Richmond in January 1781, the British forces effectively chased Jefferson from office. General Charles Cornwallis dispatched a cavalry force led by Banastre Tarleton to capture Jefferson and members of the Assembly at Monticello, but Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia thwarted the British plan, and Jefferson escaped to Poplar Forest, his plantation to the west. A subsequent legislative inquiry into his conduct as governor was embarrassing, though ultimately cleared. He retired to Monticello in 1781, shaken, and channeled his energies into writing Notes on the State of Virginia – his only book.

This period matters enormously for how we read the Declaration. Jefferson had written of freedom while enslaving hundreds; he had called for resistance to tyranny while struggling to muster an effective military response to actual invasion. The gap between his words and his governance was already apparent in the months immediately after the document he wrote became the founding creed of a new nation.

Key Passages

Meacham’s prose is at its most illuminating when he captures Jefferson’s own paradoxes in the man’s own words. Jefferson hated confrontation, and yet his understanding of power and of human nature enabled him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his mistakes, and to prevail. This formulation – conflict-averse yet politically masterful – is the engine of Meacham’s entire interpretation.

Jefferson is seen as a man who, given the opportunity, would avoid confrontation, but whose profound understanding of the machinations of power and human nature made him a natural leader of men – able to motivate them to action, create ideas, correct mistakes and learn from them. Meacham repeatedly shows how Jefferson pursued his ends through proxies, through carefully cultivated networks of allies, through letters and newspaper placements and dinner-table conversations – never through direct confrontation. It is a portrait of power operating in the shadows that feels strikingly modern.

Dialogue with the Other Books in This Series

Placed within the “Architects of Independence” reading series, Meacham’s Jefferson both complements and complicates the surrounding biographies. His account aligns well with David McCullough’s John Adams on the mechanics of the drafting process – both authors confirm Adams’s central role in steering the assignment to Jefferson and his subsequent light-touch editing of the draft. Where they diverge is in temperament: McCullough’s Adams is a man of transparent moral seriousness; Meacham’s Jefferson operates through indirection and strategic ambiguity.

With Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, the conversation is even richer. Ellis, who called the Declaration’s words “the most potent and consequential words in American history,” wrote extensively about the founders’ personal rivalries and ideological fault lines. Meacham largely shares Ellis’s view of Jefferson as a political genius but is arguably more sympathetic to his subject than Ellis’s often skeptical lens allows. Some critics felt that Meacham goes out of his way to portray Jefferson as a “man of his time” – and that often his excuses for Jefferson’s backtracking are so generic as to apply to any politician.

Against Pauline Maier’s American Scripture, which argues that the Declaration was ultimately the work of Congress as a collective body rather than Jefferson’s individual genius, Meacham stands in partial tension. He acknowledges Congress’s editorial role but never abandons the fundamental premise that Jefferson’s voice – his particular gift for distilling revolutionary philosophy into ringing prose – was irreplaceable. The two books are best read as complementary: Maier tells us what the document became; Meacham tells us what kind of mind conceived it.

Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, which opens this reading series, provides the essential framing for Meacham’s Jefferson – the portrait of a founding generation that believed character and public virtue were inseparable from political legitimacy. Meacham’s Jefferson is Wood’s thesis made flesh: a man whose character was simultaneously his greatest asset and his deepest liability.

Historical Reassessment: What We’ve Learned Since 2012

The Art of Power was published in the same year that Monticello opened a major joint exhibit with the Smithsonian on the enslaved community at Jefferson’s plantation – a significant cultural moment in the ongoing reassessment of Jefferson’s legacy. In June 2018, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation asserted that Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings is “settled historical matter.” This is a harder line than Meacham took in 2012, and it shifts the moral weight of the biography considerably.

The scholarly consensus on the Hemings relationship has also firmed considerably in the decade since the book’s publication. Since the 1998 DNA study, several historians have concluded that Jefferson maintained a long sexual relationship with Hemings and fathered six children with her, four of whom survived to adulthood. The relationship began, historians now believe, when Hemings was between fourteen and sixteen years old and Jefferson was in his mid-forties. Meacham addresses this in the book but some readers and reviewers have felt he treats it with insufficient moral gravity – prioritizing the political Jefferson over the enslaving Jefferson.

The broader field of founding-era scholarship has also moved toward centering the enslaved and the dispossessed in ways that challenge the great-man framework Meacham employs. Annette Gordon-Reed’s work, in particular, has made it increasingly difficult to read a Jefferson biography that does not grapple systematically with the Hemings family’s experience as its own story, not merely as a complication in Jefferson’s.

Reader’s Value: Why Read This in 2026?

In an era when democratic institutions are under renewed stress, when the gap between political idealism and political reality feels especially acute, Meacham’s central argument carries fresh urgency. Jefferson was not a saint who fell short of his ideals. He was a politician who understood that ideals themselves are tools – wielded strategically, deployed selectively, powerful precisely because they transcend the compromises required to advance them. His story resonates today not least because he led his nation through ferocious partisanship amid economic uncertainty and external threat – the eternal drama of a leadership striving for greatness in a difficult and confounding world.

The Art of Power is also simply excellent narrative history – Meacham never lets the weight of scholarship bury the human drama of his subject’s life. For readers moving through this Declaration-focused series, it provides the essential bridge between the procedural history of how the document was written (Maier) and the personal dynamics among the men who wrote it (Ellis). Jefferson is the hinge on which the entire history turns, and Meacham’s biography remains the most readable and most complete account of how the man who gave the Declaration its voice actually moved through the world — with genius, with appetite, with contradiction, and with an art of power that both built a nation and left its deepest promises unfulfilled.

To read Jefferson is to read the unfinished argument of American democracy itself. Meacham makes that argument vivid and inescapable – which is exactly what the best biography does.

A Note on This Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.

You can find the entire series listing here.

Smashed, Steamed, or Grilled: Your Guide to National Burger Day

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Every year around late May, you can just smell it in the air – that specific, greasy grill smoke from beef hitting a hot flat-top. National Burger Day on May 28th isn’t just some made-up internet holiday; it’s a day celebrating the ultimate American comfort food. Burgers have been the one thing everyone can agree on forever, whether you got them from an old-school shack or a 24-hour diner. If you’re firing up the grill or ordering takeout this week, you really need to look at what George Motz is doing, because he’s basically mapped out the entire country’s burger scene.

If burgers are a religion in this country, George Motz is definitely the guy preaching it. He just put out the 4th edition of Hamburger America, which just proves he’s still the absolute expert on this stuff. It’s not just a list of places to eat; it’s a massive road trip guide showing how different states do their burgers. The best way to spend the day is just following his lead and finding something good to eat.

The Evolution of a Legend

After the first edition of Hamburger America came out, a small but passionate community of burger obsessives began reaching out to Motz from all over the country. Many emailed to say they’d love to have his job – and almost all of them wanted to help with future research.

Most were already respected food writers or local burger experts in their own cities and regions. Over time, this growing network became invaluable to Motz. They were often the first to uncover hidden gems and new discoveries. He jokingly started calling them his EBTs – Expert Burger Tasters – and they embraced the role with remarkable seriousness.

With each new edition of the book, the EBT ranks expanded. After the second edition, the list quadrupled, and by the third and fourth editions, dozens more had joined the mission. Today, it’s a large and deeply committed group, and Motz is grateful to every one of them.

These EBTs willingly venture into forgotten roadside stands, worn-down diners, and questionable dives – sometimes driving hours just to taste a burger and report back. Their groundwork makes my own research sharper and far more efficient. Along the way, many of them have also become close friends and trusted burger companions, often joining me when I visit their favorite local spots.

Motz has spent twenty years driving down backroads just looking for the best local spots. This new edition is huge – it has over 200 places he encourages you to try. What I like about his style is that he only cares about “real” burgers – meaning fresh beef, never frozen, from places that have been doing it right for decades.

He really goes to bat for all the weird local styles that make food interesting. Whether it’s the deep-fried burger of Memphis or the butter-soaked patties of Wisconsin, Motz treats each variation with the reverence a historian might give a founding document. He shows how these burgers actually tell you a lot about the blue-collar towns where they started.

The Map of Flavor

National Burger Day is a good excuse to actually try one of these weird regional styles from the book. Like the Oklahoma Fried Onion Burger – people started making those during the Depression because onions were cheap, so they smashed a ton of them into the meat to make it stretch. Over the years the number of these burger joints has dwindled, but the fans still flock into El Reno, OK on the first Saturday in May to celebrate the “World’s Largest Fried Onion Burger,” where the three remaining restaurants work together to create a 12-foot round onion burger – sharing it with thirty-thousand plus crowd.

Then there is the Steamed Cheeseburger of Connecticut, where they steam the burgers and the cheese in a little metal box until it’s just a gooey mess. It sounds totally bizarre if you didn’t grow up there, but it’s a total classic.

Or how about the weirdly named but awesome tasting Slug Burger, a regional specialty of northern Mississippi? Developed during the Great Depression as burger counters dreamed up ways to stretch their ground beef, these burgers have breadcrumbs from yesterday’s bread added in, along with various spices. Curious about the name? It comes from slang of the era when a “slug” meant a nickel – which is what one of the burgers cost.

The stories above could be repeated in every state as various cooks over the decades have added this or that ingredient or cooking technique to hit on a winner recipe that their customers flocked in to buy.

The book shows that eating at these places links you back to generations of people doing the exact same thing.

The Philosophy of the Smash

Throughout the book Motz points out details about the “smash” technique – where you press the beef hard onto a searing hot griddle to get that perfect, crispy crust. That’s where all the flavor hides anyway. Cooks and burger joints all across have been doing it for generations, but every type of restaurant seems to have its own version lately. According to Motz, you don’t need fancy stuff like truffle oil; you just need salt, high heat, and a heavy spatula.

Keeping it simple is why people love burgers in the first place. Food gets way too pretentious these days, but a good burger doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Motz likes to say that every burger is a sandwich, but a sandwich isn’t a burger. You need the right blend of meat – usually 80/20 – and a bun that won’t fall apart when things get juicy.

Celebrating May 28th: Your Personal Pilgrimage

So what should you do on National Burger Day? The book gives you a couple of options. You could drive out to an old greasy spoon from the guide – like Louis’ Lunch in Connecticut, where they say the burger was invented back in 1900. Or just stay home and try out Motz’s cooking tips in your own kitchen. The great thing about burgers is that anybody can make a good one. You don’t need a fancy kitchen; you just have to do what the old-school places do.

More Than Just Meat

Today is really about cheering for the short-order cooks who’ve been using the same grill for fifty years, the diners where they know your name, and guys like Motz keeping the history alive. It’s time to grab a burger today and think about how much history is actually packed into it. George Motz’s Hamburger America, 4th Edition is great because it reminds you that behind every good burger is usually a family business or some local tradition that survived.

So whether you like them smashed, steamed, or cooked over charcoal – with onions, pickles, or just plain salt and pepper – go get a good one. Enjoy your burger! 

I’ve been into burgers for a long time – check out my Burger Quest from a few years ago!

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

Off by Two Days: John Adams and the Declaration of Independence

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John Adams was the foremost advocate in Congress for independence and the driving force behind Jefferson’s appointment as primary drafter. David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography captures his central role in bringing the Declaration into existence

The Man Who Made It Happen

On the morning of July 2, 1776, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail with barely contained elation. The Continental Congress had just voted in favor of independence – a moment Adams believed would be remembered forever. He predicted that future generations would celebrate the date with bonfires and illuminations across the continent. He was off by two days. History would settle on July 4th, when the Declaration was formally adopted, and the man who received the glory would not be Adams but Thomas Jefferson, the elegant Virginian whose soaring prose had transformed Adams’s hard-won political victory into an enduring piece of literature.

That gap between what Adams actually accomplished and the recognition he received is the quiet heartbreak running through David McCullough’s magnificent 2001 biography, John Adams. In an era when Americans argue constantly about credit, legacy, and who gets to shape the national narrative, the story of John Adams feels startlingly, even painfully, contemporary. His life is a case study in the distance between doing the essential work and being remembered for it.

The Biographer and His Subject

David McCullough came to John Adams as one of America’s most celebrated popular historians, already the author of landmark works on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Johnstown Flood, and Harry Truman. His Truman biography had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and with John Adams he would claim a second Pulitzer in 2002. McCullough’s method is immersive and humanizing: he reads his subjects’ diaries, correspondence, and contemporaries’ accounts until, as he once described it, he can almost hear them talking. The result is history written with the momentum of a novel without sacrificing scholarly seriousness.

McCullough chose Adams at a pivotal cultural moment. By 2001, Jefferson’s reputation had been significantly complicated by the DNA evidence confirming a relationship with his enslaved servant Sally Hemings, and Washington had long since hardened into marble. Adams, who owned no enslaved people and whose prickly, honest, sometimes maddening character resisted mythologizing, suddenly seemed like the most human of the founders. McCullough’s timing was not cynical – he had been fascinated by Adams for years – but it was fortuitous. The book became a phenomenon, spending months on bestseller lists and inspiring an HBO miniseries.

The Central Argument: The Necessary Gadfly

McCullough’s core argument is that John Adams was the indispensable revolutionary – not the most gifted writer, not the most charismatic leader, but the man whose ferocious determination, moral clarity, and sheer force of will made independence possible when it might otherwise have stalled or collapsed.

The argument takes shape most powerfully in McCullough’s treatment of Adams’s work in the Continental Congress from 1775 through the summer of 1776. Where many delegates arrived in Philadelphia uncertain, cautious, or genuinely opposed to a final break with Britain, Adams arrived convinced that independence was not merely desirable but inevitable and necessary. He lobbied, argued, cajoled, and wore down resistance with a tenacity that exhausted even those who agreed with him. Jefferson, who watched him work, called him “the colossus of independence” and noted that Adams was “not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but that “he came out occasionally with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.”

When the decision came to appoint a committee to draft a declaration, Adams made the choice that would ultimately cost him historical prominence: he selected Jefferson to write it. In McCullough’s telling, Adams’s reasoning was both practical and generous. Jefferson was from Virginia, the largest colony, and his support would be essential. He had a “peculiar felicity of expression,” as Adams acknowledged, that Adams knew he himself lacked. And Adams was already so overcommitted – serving on dozens of committees – that he had little time for the extended composition the task required. It was a decision made from strategic wisdom, not self-effacement, but history’s irony is merciless: Adams chose well for the country and suffered for it in memory.

The Months That Followed: Independence in the Balance

If Adams feared that the Declaration’s signing was the end of his essential role, the months that followed proved otherwise. The summer and fall of 1776 were among the most desperate of the entire war, and Adams was at the center of nearly every critical decision.

In September 1776, Adams participated in the failed peace conference at Staten Island, meeting with British Admiral Lord Howe in an encounter McCullough renders with almost cinematic tension. Howe offered reconciliation on terms that would have effectively nullified independence; Adams refused, understanding that any negotiated return to the British fold would destroy everything the Declaration had declared. The talks collapsed, and the war that everyone had known was coming became unavoidably, irreversibly real.

Adams then threw himself into the work of organizing the Continental Army, chairing the Board of War and Ordnance with his characteristic furious energy. He wrote reports, requisitioned supplies, argued for longer enlistments, and struggled against the chronic incompetence and corruption that plagued the American war effort. These were not glamorous tasks. There would be no statues erected to the man who fixed the army’s supply chain, but without that work, Washington’s troops would have had nothing to fight with.

By the end of 1777, Adams had been selected for one of the most consequential assignments of the Revolution: diplomatic mission to France. He would sail across the Atlantic in early 1778 – a dangerous voyage – to help secure the French alliance that Washington desperately needed. The Declaration’s survival, it turned out, would depend not only on the men who signed it but on the diplomats who persuaded Europe to take it seriously.

The Voice of the Text

McCullough’s prose has the quality of good conversation: clear, warm, and propulsive, with an eye for the detail that illuminates character. He is at his best in the intimate moments – Adams defending British soldiers during a trial following the 1770 Boston Massacre, Adams up before dawn to read Cicero, Adams writing letters to Abigail that crackle with affection and intellectual hunger, Adams sitting alone in the gallery of Congress watching Jefferson receive the credit for work that Adams had, in a real sense, made possible.

Some of the book’s most interesting passages capture the partnership and rivalry with Jefferson in miniature. McCullough describes the two men in Paris in 1784, and notes that despite their profound political differences, they were genuinely fond of each other – two brilliant men from utterly different worlds who recognized something essential in the other. The friendship’s later collapse and eventual reconciliation (both men died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration) gives the book its wistful final movement.

McCullough also excels at capturing Adams’s self-awareness about his own difficult personality. Adams knew he was vain, irritable, and sometimes his own worst enemy. “I have one talent,” he once wrote, “and that is an honest heart.” In McCullough’s rendering, that honesty – the refusal to flatter, to temporize, to tell people what they wanted to hear – was both his greatest virtue and his greatest political liability.

Dialogue with the Series

Read alongside the other works in “The Architects of Independence,” John Adams occupies a distinctive position: it is the book that most forcefully challenges the sensationalistic tendency in revolutionary biography.

Where Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power and Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin present their subjects with the advantage of posterity’s settled admiration, McCullough’s Adams is perpetually under-appreciated within the narrative itself. This makes for a productive tension. Meacham’s Jefferson is the visionary who gave the Declaration its moral vocabulary; McCullough’s Adams is the political engineer who made the vote for independence possible in the first place. Neither book is wrong. Both are necessary.

The contrast with Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers is equally illuminating. Ellis, whose work spans multiple founders, treats Adams with sympathy but also with the slightly clinical detachment of a scholar who can see all the founding relationships at once. McCullough is fully, unashamedly inside Adams’s point of view – a different kind of truth. And Pauline Maier’s American Scripture, the series’ most academically rigorous entry, provides the essential corrective to both: her argument that Congress itself, not Jefferson or Adams alone, shaped the final Declaration reminds us that individual biography, however excellent, always risks distorting a collective achievement.

Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, which opened the series, provides the intellectual framework that makes Adams comprehensible: the founding generation’s deep anxiety about reputation, honor, and posterity helps explain why Adams’s historical marginalization wounded him so deeply and why McCullough’s rehabilitation feels so satisfying.

What We Have Learned Since 2001

McCullough’s biography arrived before the most significant recent scholarship on Adams had fully developed. In the years since, historians have devoted increasing attention to Abigail Adams as an intellectual and political partner – a dimension McCullough acknowledges but does not fully develop. More recent work has examined Abigail’s own views on slavery and women’s rights, views that were in some respects more progressive than her husband’s and that complicate any simple portrait of the Adams household.

Scholars have also pushed back gently on McCullough’s occasionally romanticizes treatment of Adams’s foreign policy judgment. Adams’s decision to pursue peace with France in 1799 – presented by McCullough as an act of courageous statesmanship – has been reexamined in light of new archival work suggesting the diplomatic situation was more ambiguous than the biography implies.

The broader historiographical trend since 2001 has moved toward recovery of voices that founders-focused biography necessarily marginalizes: the enslaved people whose labor made the founders’ leisure possible, the Indigenous nations whose lands were already being eyed as the price of “independence,” the women whose political thinking shaped the era without appearing in the official record. McCullough’s Adams is a great man biography in the classic mode – absorbing and important, but written in a tradition that subsequent historians have productively challenged.

Why Read This Book in 2026

For readers joining the “Booked for the Revolution” series at this juncture, John Adams performs an essential corrective function: it insists that the Declaration of Independence was not the product of genius alone but of grueling political work – of committee meetings and floor votes and personal persuasion and strategic calculation. Adams, with his unlovely virtues of persistence and moral stubbornness, is the founder who most resembles the kind of citizen that democratic republics actually require: not the brilliant visionary, but the person who shows up, does the work, and refuses to give up.

In 2026, when the mechanisms of democratic governance feel simultaneously fragile and indispensable, that is not a trivial lesson. McCullough’s Adams is also a meditation on the relationship between character and legacy – on how history distributes credit unevenly and how the people who make essential things possible are often not the people remembered for them.

The book is, finally, a great read: richly researched, beautifully written, and emotionally generous to its subject without ever descending into mere celebration. For any reader who wants to understand not just what the Declaration said but how it came to exist – the bruising, brilliant, exhausting human process by which thirteen fractious colonies agreed to stake everything on a single document – John Adams is essential.

A Personal Note

An early “trigger” leading the the genesis of the “Booked for the Revolution” series was a journey recreating the Great Wagon Road early colonists used to move from Pennsylvania through Virginia into North Carolina and beyond; you can read it here. Part of that journey was looking into my ancestry, as family history told of earlier Adams families who came to America from Germany, and then slowly migrated south over nine generations, ending up in Tennessee. However, some tantalizing clues began to appear during my research then, and have resurfaced again in research into the life of President John Adams.

There has been some confusion over my second great-grandfather due to deaths of spouses, remarriages to women with existing children, and the very common use of the name “John” in the Adams family.

Let’s just say that this isn’t the last time I will be looking at President John Adams, his ancestors in England, his well-known immediate children and grandchildren, and his extended family over the past few centuries.

A new series is definitely in the works!

A Note on the “Booked for America” Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.

You can find the entire series listing here.

May 20, 1775: First in Freedom, Last to Get Credit

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Three books that make the case for America’s forgotten first independence.

Every May 20th, the date printed on the North Carolina state flag gets its moment of annual celebration here in Mecklenburg County. There are speeches, maybe a reenactment. The Queen City tips its hat to a story that most of the country has never heard, then moves on. But in 2026 – as the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary with parades, fireworks, and the full weight of collective patriotic feeling – that quiet, local ritual has never carried more weight. Because if three books about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence are right, the story of American freedom doesn’t begin on July 4, 1776. It begins here. On May 20, 1775. Fourteen months earlier. In a log courthouse that used to stand where Uptown Charlotte now hums with commerce.

That’s either the most extraordinary fact in American history or one of its most elaborate myths. And the question of which it is has consumed lawyers, historians, journalists, and devoted amateurs for more than two centuries. Three books – David Fleming’s Who’s Your Founding Father?, Scott Syfert’s The First American Declaration of Independence?, and Richard Plumer’s Charlotte and the American Revolution – approach that question from different angles, with different tools, in different voices. Read together, they form something close to a complete portrait of an event that deserves to be far more than a footnote on a state flag.

What Actually Happened — or What People Say Happened

The story, as best we can reconstruct it: on May 19–20, 1775, roughly two dozen militia leaders from Mecklenburg County gathered in Charlotte’s log courthouse. Word had just arrived of the battles at Lexington and Concord. Enraged, they drafted a declaration severing Mecklenburg County’s ties to the British Crown, declaring themselves free and independent people. A tavern owner named James Jack rode nearly six hundred miles to Philadelphia to deliver it to the Continental Congress, who considered it premature and quietly set it aside. The original document was later lost – possibly destroyed in a fire – and the story largely faded until 1819, when John Adams stumbled upon a newspaper account of it and wrote to his old political rival Thomas Jefferson that it was “one of the greatest curiosities and one of the deepest mysteries that ever occurred to me.”

Jefferson, for his part, called it “spurious.” Which is exactly what you might expect a man to say if he’d lifted large portions of his most famous work from someone else’s document.

That charge – that Jefferson plagiarized the MecDec when writing the national Declaration of Independence – is at the molten core of all three books. Adams believed it. Eleven U.S. presidents, by various accounts, have found the story credible enough to warrant further investigation. And the language of the two documents bears uncomfortable similarities that are either cosmic coincidence or the most consequential act of intellectual theft in American history.

Three Authors, Three Lenses

David Fleming: The Gonzo Investigator

David Fleming arrived at the MecDec story the way a lot of people do – sideways, almost accidentally, pulled in by the sheer strangeness of it. A veteran sports journalist for ESPN and Sports Illustrated known for his irreverent, character-driven long-form work, Fleming is not a historian by training. He is, as he’s been described, a gonzo journalist – and that’s precisely what makes Who’s Your Founding Father? (2023) so readable, so genuinely fun, and so unexpectedly moving.

Fleming describes himself falling down a rabbit hole, then deciding to go deeper instead of climbing out. What follows is part detective story, part road trip, part love letter to Charlotte and the stubborn locals who’ve refused to let this story die. He visits archives. He wanders through cemeteries. He travels to England. He is constitutionally unable to resist a Dunkin’ Donuts reference. His affection for the “misfit band of zealous Scots-Irish patriots, whiskey-loving Princeton scholars and a fanatical frontier preacher” who gathered in that courthouse is genuine and infectious.

But the book is not merely entertaining. Fleming makes a substantive case. He traces the journey of James Jack’s six-hundred-mile horse ride with the reverence it deserves, reconstructs the intellectual and theological climate that made such a declaration possible, and builds a compelling argument that the MecDec’s obscurity is not an accident of history – it’s the result of active suppression, first by the Continental Congress who feared its radicalism, then by Jefferson’s defenders who had every reason to keep the plagiarism question buried.

Reviewers have compared the book to National Treasure, which sounds like a throwaway compliment but actually captures something real: Fleming makes you feel the stakes. When author Tommy Tomlinson calls Who’s Your Founding Father? a book that “will change how you see American history,” it’s the kind of blurb that usually oversells – but here, it lands. The book has a way of making Charlotteans feel a proprietary pride they maybe didn’t know they were missing.

Scott Syfert: The Lawyer Who Became a Believer

Where Fleming comes at the MecDec as an outsider who converts, Scott Syfert comes as a resident who decided to do the work. A corporate attorney and co-founder of the May 20th Society – the nonprofit dedicated to keeping the MecDec’s legacy alive – Syfert published The First American Declaration of Independence? in 2013, a full decade before Fleming’s book arrived. He is the foundational text. Fleming, to his credit, acknowledges as much.

Syfert’s book is structured like a legal brief written by someone who understands that jurors need stories, not just evidence. He divides the book into five sections, walking readers through the backcountry origins of Mecklenburg County, the formation of its fiercely independent Scots-Irish Presbyterian community, the events of May 1775, and then the two centuries of controversy that followed. He presents both sides. He genuinely does. But as one reviewer noted, he approaches the material like a defense attorney rather than a neutral judge: the goal is not a verdict of “definitely happened” but rather reasonable doubt about the doubters.

The book’s great contribution is its methodical excavation of the evidence. Syfert examines the surviving correspondence of North Carolina’s royal governor, who referred to treasonous activity in Mecklenburg in dispatches that predate any supposed forgery. He traces the similarities between the MecDec’s language and Jefferson’s 1776 text, and walks through Adams’s private letters accusing Jefferson directly. He handles the fire that destroyed the original document – the most convenient fact for skeptics – with the seriousness it deserves rather than dismissing it as simply unlucky.

Ken Burns called Syfert’s book a work that rescues “a little-known story of our Revolutionary past” and brings it “vividly to life.” Historian Andrew Roberts described it as “one of the finest pieces of historical detective work I’ve ever read,” calling Syfert “the Sherlock Holmes of the Mecklenburg Declaration.” That’s not overstatement. By the end, a reader who began skeptical will find, as one Journal of the American Revolution reviewer did, that they’ve “accepted the possibility that the document may indeed have existed.”

The question mark in the title is honest. Syfert doesn’t claim certainty. He claims probability, marshaled through careful, readable, thoroughly cited work. That intellectual honesty is part of what makes the book so effective.

Richard Plumer: The Ground-Level Chronicler

If Fleming is the entertainer and Syfert is the advocate, Richard Plumer is the archivist – the writer who zooms out to show you the full landscape in which the MecDec was born. Charlotte and the American Revolution (2014, The History Press) is the most locally rooted of the three books, and in some ways the most essential for Mecklenburg County residents who want to understand not just what the MecDec says but why it was possible here, in this place, among these specific people.

Plumer’s central subject is the Reverend Alexander Craighead, the fiery Presbyterian minister whose theological and political rhetoric became the intellectual kindling for the Declaration. Craighead was not a mild man. His ultraconservative Calvinist theology mapped neatly onto revolutionary politics: obedience to unjust authority was not just impractical, it was spiritually impermissible. He preached a congregation into a posture of resistance long before Lexington and Concord gave that resistance a specific target.

Plumer is a member of the Mecklenburg Historical Association, and his book reads like the work of someone who has spent years in county archives, church records, and family histories. The detail is rich. The context is essential. He makes clear that the MecDec did not emerge from nowhere – it emerged from a specific community, shaped by specific theology, living at the edge of civilization with minimal help from and maximum frustration with British authority.

The raw numbers he surfaces are remarkable: though Mecklenburg County held less than three percent of North Carolina’s colonial population, its patriots accounted for more than a quarter of the colony’s Revolutionary troops. This was not a passive place. This was a community already constitutionally disposed toward independence, waiting for the moment to say so formally.

Plumer’s book fills in the human geography that makes the other two books make sense. You can read Fleming and feel the excitement of the story. You can read Syfert and feel the weight of the evidence. But read Plumer, and you understand the why – the theology, the culture, the community that made it conceivable that two dozen men in a log courthouse in the Carolina backcountry could look at each other on May 20, 1775, and say: enough. We’re done.

Why 2026 Is the Year to Read All Three

There’s something clarifying about big anniversaries. America’s 250th birthday is a moment when the country tends to revisit its founding myths – to ask which ones are accurate, which ones are convenient, and which ones have been quietly buried. The MecDec story is all three at once.

As a resident of Mecklenburg County, I live on ground that may have been the actual cradle of American independence. Not Philadelphia. Not Boston. Here. And yet most of my neighbors – and nearly all of my fellow Americans – have never heard of May 20, 1775. That tension feels worth correcting in a year when the nation is, for once, paying attention to its own origins.

The three books, read together, form something like a complete case. Plumer gives you the soil – the culture and community that made the MecDec possible. Syfert gives you the evidence – the most thorough, balanced, legally rigorous examination of what we know and don’t know. And Fleming gives you the joy of discovery – the reminder that history isn’t just the province of academics, that a journalist with a plane ticket and an obsession can still crack open a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mystery and find something worth knowing inside.

None of the three books claims to have settled the debate definitively. The original document is gone. The evidence is circumstantial in places and contested in others. But there are things that are harder to explain away: the royal governor’s letters mentioning treasonous Mecklenburg activity before any supposed forgery could have occurred. The eyewitness accounts collected decades later. The extraordinary overlap between the MecDec’s language and Jefferson’s draft. The suspicious silence of a man – Jefferson – who was not typically silent about anything.

John Adams believed the story was real and begged his country to take it seriously. He called it “the genuine sense of America” – not a regional curiosity, but the truest expression of what the revolution was actually about: ordinary people, in an ordinary place, deciding that they were done waiting for permission to be free.

The people who signed that document in Charlotte’s log courthouse – the Scots-Irish farmers and frontier preachers and tavern owners – were not famous. They were not Founding Fathers with portraits and monuments. They were, in many ways, the people who usually get left out of the story. And that’s exactly why, in 2026, the story of the MecDec feels so present, and so important, and so worth finally telling.

If you’re looking for books that challenge what you thought you knew about America’s origins, look no further.

This unforgettable trio delivers history with a healthy dose of humor, reads like a true-crime caper, and provides a thought-provoking, entertaining, and utterly unforgettable dive into a piece of the past that might just rewrite a small, but significant, chapter in the story of American independence. 

You might even find yourself rooting for a different “founding father” by the end!

If you liked this article, or are curious about American history – especially during the growing excitement around the 250th anniversary of the other Declaration of Independence, you might be interested in “Booked for the Revolution.”

It’s a weekly article published on Fridays that takes a look at the beginning years of the U.S. through a book each week. Check out the series here.

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.