We’re excited to share a sneak-peak of our next upcoming title in the Emerging Revolutionary War Series, published by Savas Beatie:

About the Book:

“The man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independence is Mr. John Adams…. I call him the Atlas of American independence.”

So attested one of the delegates to the Second Continental Congress, moved to support independence after months of angst, indecision, dithering, and fear. Thomas Jefferson called Adams “our colossus on the floor,” arguing with power, passion, and persuasive force of reason why America needed to take the extraordinary step to break from the British Empire and set up an independent nation.

Born of humble means outside Boston, Massachusetts, Adams’s work ethic led him to become one of the colony’s most successful attorneys. Yet he burned with a powerful ambition and yearned for more. “I never shall shine, till some animating Occasion calls forth all my Powers,” he fretted.

Festering tension in Boston with British soldiers and taxation and trade policies—tension that spread across all thirteen colonies—provided the occasion Adam longed for, and soon he found himself at the center of the storm, thrust onto the national stage where all his “Powers” transformed him into the intellectual architect of American independence. Perhaps more than any other American, he rose to the historical moment, urging his contemporaries into the unknown future.

But his efforts came at tremendous cost: long separations from his beloved children and “dearest friend” and wife, Abigail, who forged for herself a role as long-distance political counselor even as she managed affairs on the family farm in a way nearly unprecedented for 18th century America.

“The times alone have destined me to fame,” Adams wrote. Atlas of Independence: John Adams and the American Revolution offers a reader-friendly overview of Adams’s seminal role in that tumultuous Founding time.

About the Author:

Chris Mackowski, Ph.D., is a writing professor in St. Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Communication. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Emerging Civil War and advisory editor for Emerging Revolutionary War.

He has written, co-written, or edited more than thirty books.

When the musical 1776 debuted on Broadway, it came at what seemed like an unconventional time. The Vietnam War was underway, and American patriotism was being taxed as it had never been taxed before during wartime. Nonetheless, the production was a commercial and critical success, earning three Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

The show made the jump to film—I know a number of people who watch it every year on the Fourth of July—and it enjoyed revivals in 1997 and 2016. But the show never enjoyed the sort of enduring life off Broadway that classics like Hello, Dolly or Oklahoma! or Mame have enjoyed. (I could rattle off a dozen such names, and most readers would go, “Ohhhh, that’s a good one.” South Pacific? Meet Me in St. Louis? The Wizard of Oz? On and on….) As written, 1776 requires a cast of twenty-four men and only two women. That makes it exceptionally difficult to cast on the community theater level, where a majority of auditioners are typically female.

So perhaps the new national touring production of 1776, based on a 2022 Broadway revival, might offer a new way to look at the show. The new production, which I saw last week at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., consists of “a company of artists who reflect multiple representations of race, ethnicity, and gender, and who identify as female, trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming.” That’s a mouthful, but the bottom line is that these are not your typical Founding Fathers because they aren’t “fathers” at all.

The production owns its new lens from the opening lines. To a backdrop of John Trumbull’s famous painting The Declaration of Independence, John Adams (as played by Gisela Adisa) begins the show: “In my many years, I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.” Adisa, a black woman, looks pointedly at the painting. “By God, I have had this Congress,” she says.

Her meaning is unmistakable: these dead white men are tired and old. Time for something new.

The cast comes onstage and literally steps into the buckle-topped leather shoes of the Founders. They hoist the bottom cuffs of their pantlegs up, transforming them into knickerbockers. And away they go! Soon enough, the whole cast is shout-singing at Adams to “Sit down, John!”

The production conceit obviously owes a lot to the Tony Award-winning Hamilton, which opened in 2015 with a multicultural cast. Writer Lin-Manuel Miranda reportedly read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and saw a lot of himself in the Founder: an Everyman from humble beginnings who transformed himself into a self-made man. If Miranda could see himself in this old “dead white male,” couldn’t others, as well?

Casting the Revolutionary generation outside of its historical color, race, and gender boundaries proved revolutionary in and of itself, but it proved remarkably successful. Hamilton’s story—and the larger story of America—became newly accessible to huge new audiences. Ditching fifes and drums for a hip-hop and soul soundtrack also reframed the story and increased history’s modern appeal.

Ironically, one of Miranda’s inspirations for Hamilton was the much more traditional 1776. “1776 certainly paved the way for Hamilton,” Miranda said in feature in Playbill, “not just in that it’s about our founders, but also in that it engages fully with their humanity. I think it makes them accessible to us in a very real way.” That Playbill piece, funny enough, consisted of a conversation between Miranda and William Daniels, who played John Adams in the original 1776 production and in the film. (It’s a neat interview. You can read it here.)

As I prepared to watch 1776 at the Kennedy Center, I pondered whether the same conceit would work for this show the way it had for Hamilton. I understand the “Everyman” idea, but on the other hand, the members of the Second Continental Congress were hardly “Everymen.” They were, quite literally, the political elites of their respective colonies. But there’s room, too, to get into the weeds on that. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams both came from humble origins even if Edward Rutledge or Richard Henry Lee did not. And that’s the point of good history: get into the weeds. Look at the shades of gray. Find new lenses to see the familiar in new ways so you can better understand what you’re looking at.

It would be a mistake to brush aside this production of 1776 as woke-ism or political correctness or any of that. “I’m not interested in talking about American history because I want to punish America,” said Bryan Stevenson, creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, quoted by the show’s directors in the program. “I want to liberate America.”

1776 proved liberating. While the production conceit didn’t work 100% of the time, it mostly did, and at those times it worked best, it added powerful, powerful resonance. When the delegates sang of the slave trade in “Molasses to Rum,” for instance, and some of those performers were Black women, the sinister nature of the dark bargain at the heart of the Founding reverberated with a tragic sense of the now. And when echoes of Adams’s plaintive “Is Anybody Out There,” sung by a black woman, wove through, it was chilling and urgent. History spoke from the stage to us in the present.

Newly sanctioned additions to the production gave us Abigail Adams’s “remember the ladies”—magnified in its power among a non-male cast. It also adds Robert Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved servant, as a silent figure on stage, voiceless as Jefferson pens the enduring words “All men are created equal.” These were delightful, thought-provoking moments that confronted American history without being confrontational.

1776 is, to be sure, a delightful show, but it’s less jingoistic than one might expect for a story about America’s birthday. It asks us to consider the costs of that founding, not so we can feel bad about America but so can be reminded of the ongoing work to live up to our own ideals. It asks us not to think of a founding moment but, instead, the beginning of founding process that we are all invited to be part of because the work belongs to us all.