New York City -
We do not teach history well as a nation, and what we teach is often fabled, dramatized, sanitized, and far too U.S.-centric. It’s sometimes wrong, too, especially when it jingoistically places America at the center of everything.
America celebrates Independence Day today, here amidst a tall ships parade and fireworks extravaganza on the Hudson River joining festivities nationwide. We do so with caution, however, because of ignorant, hate-filled forces that currently seek to destroy our democracy.
Let’s find the humility and grace - two concepts absent from much of today’s political dialogue, especially from one truly dangerous political party - to understand that our great quest for freedom and democracy in the 18th Century was but part of a global mosaic of revolution. We were never in it alone in fighting authoritarianism.
The American Revolution occurred within an overarching, global set of conflicts between Britain and France. Its immediate antecedent was the so-called French and Indian War (1754-1763), but that conflict here was a subset of the global Seven Years War (1756-1763) between Britain (with Prussia and Portugal) and France (with Austria and Spain), which spread across North America, India, Africa, East Asia and many indigenous nations including Native Americans. There’s good reason why Churchill said the Seven Years War was really our First World War.
The Seven Years War drained the British coffers. London raised taxes and fees on its colonies and initiated numerous punishing, retrograde policies as a result, inciting rebellion in the 13 American colonies. Britain actually had 26 colonies in North America, however, ranging from Quebec to Florida to Bermuda to Jamaica. We’re generally only taught here about the original 13 colonies.
Our revolution was spurred, in part, by these consequences of the French and Indian War. But, as always, we were never alone. The Highland Scots attacked the British Crown in 1745 and the so-called Irish Whiteboys did similarly in the 1760s. You could call it freedom-fighting or terrorism, depending on your perspective. Jamaicans rose in defiance of the British as did Native tribes across North America. In all of this, our U.S. Founding Fathers forged - or tried to create - alliances with these other revolutionary movements.
Keep in mind, as well, that our closest allies during the Revolutionary War were France, of course, as well as Spain and the Dutch Republic. Native tribes such as the Oneida and Tuscarora partnered with us, too. One of our greatest military leaders after General Washington - a former British Redcoat Major - was the Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette. Put simply, we would not have defeated Lord Cornwallis’ British and German (Hessians) troops at Yorktown in 1781 without French soldiers and ships.
The Northwestern University historian Daniel Immerwahr reminds us of these events in a recent New Yorker piece, also citing that our victory at Yorktown owes plenty to the Sultan of Mysore, too. Uprisings against the British in southern India represented a bigger threat to Britain than the Americans and Cornwallis was forced to redeploy ships and thousands of men to fight the Sultan there.
You get the point. Ken Burns made it well in his exceptional 2025 “The American Revolution” docuseries. All the vapid “America First” isolationism talk that rears its ugly head every few decades is dangerous populist bullshit. It doesn’t exist because it can’t exist, even in the hardly “modern” 18th Century world. We’re all connected. We all have overlapping interests.
When we teach American independence, let’s also teach global interdependence. In doing so, let’s remind ourselves of the folly of convincing people that “going it alone” can ever work. It never does. Happy Independence Day … and Interdependence Day. The former would not have been possible without the latter.
