How can Americans (and others) come together, across their many divisions, to mark the 250th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence? A sense of confusion and consternation permeates discussions of the anniversary, reflecting a wider crisis among Americans and others. People wonder: are the United States of America and its origins worth celebrating? Some are hollering to Make America Great Again, others muttering that it was never all that great, and still others wondering if there is something great here that needs to be restored. One important way forward is to look again at the American Revolution and the wider context of 1776.

Yet too often we remain captive to an old story (and some newer versions of it) that the American Revolution was only about elite American white men—those Founding Fathers in their wigs and breeches—joining to overthrow the British monarchy. In the more recent iterations of this story, those men did so to protect slavery and to take Indigenous lands.

This narrow American Revolution stems in part from the common misunderstanding that the American Revolution was exclusively an American event. It was not. People all around the world—from Asian cities and West African trading castles and Caribbean islands—shaped the origins, progress, and outcomes of the American Revolution.

This book focuses not on the ways that the American Revolution affected the world (the usual move), but rather on the ways that the world shaped the American Revolution. No one has told this story in this way before. This book unearths stirring tales from all over the globe about the people and events that helped to animate the American Revolution. In pulling back to the wider world, it also reveals new ways of seeing local and national dynamics.

By centering each chapter around a positive keyword in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty, happiness, security, unity, and so on), this book allows us to see the guiding principles that energized the American Revolution and a lot else. This approach illuminates how and why key ideals of the Declaration of Independence were changing. In centering these universal values, we can move past simple hero worship, monuments to individuals (who of course had their flaws), or a great man sense of history. These keywords can still stir and unite people.

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance, but we also see the power of people coming together to protest and push back against what they saw as oppressive authority. All kinds of people from the traditional Founding Fathers to more obscure people (not all of them American) helped shape this famous course of human events.

Ongoing thread. More from Sarah M.S. Pearsall to follow.