Founding Fathers Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Here’s Why ‘The 1776 Report’ Is Nonsense

On Monday, 18 January 2021, the Trump administration released a document titled The 1776 Report, written by the 1776 Commission, an advisory commission created by President Donald Trump on 17 September 2020 with the explicit purpose to promote “patriotic education.” The report attempts to portray Founding Fathers who owned slaves as abolitionists, attempts to portray Civil Rights leaders as conservatives, and attempts to portray “progressivism” and “identity politics” as dangerous threats to “America’s principles” on par with slavery and fascism.

Professional scholars of United States history of all political leanings immediately and universally denounced The 1776 Report as wildly inaccurate, jingoistic propaganda. It would be all too easy to dismiss it as not even worth debunking. After all, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which rescinded the 1776 Commission and removed The 1776 Report from the official White House webpage on his very first day in office.

Unfortunately, I fear that simply choosing to ignore The 1776 Report would be naïve. Tens of thousands of children across the United States who attend conservative private schools or are homeschooled are fed narratives identical to those presented in The 1776 Report through inaccurate textbooks published by conservative Evangelical Protestant book publishers, such as BJU Press and Abeka.

Supporters of these textbooks and the narratives they present will undoubtedly try to use The 1776 Report to legitimize their claims. They will try to portray it as a definitive account written by renowned experts working under the commission of the United States government. Therefore, in this article, I want to briefly talk about a few of the reasons why the report is wildly dishonest and untrustworthy.

No, We’re Not Tearing Down the Washington Monument—But Contextualizing It Might Be a Good Idea

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably heard a lot of hype about how the mayor of Washington D.C. supposedly wants to tear down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. That’s not even remotely true. Right-wing media outlets and conservative pundits have been blatantly distorting the truth and blowing things totally out of proportion.

Here’s what actually happened: Muriel E. Bowser, the mayor of Washington D.C., commissioned a research committee known as the District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions Working Group to come up with a list of federal monuments in the district that they think the government should “remove, relocate, or contextualize.”

The committee itself has no power to actually do anything to any of the monuments on its list. All it has the power to do is make recommendations. Furthermore, when it comes to structures like the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, it’s pretty clear that the committee isn’t advocating for the government to just tear them down; what they’re probably thinking of is something more along the lines of putting up a sign noting some of the less-than-savory aspects of Washington and Jefferson’s lives. That’s what “contextualize” means.

Unfortunately, Fox News and other conservative media outlets are so hellbent on portraying liberals as deranged, frothing-at-the-mouth communist radicals who want to destroy American culture that they’ve seized on this committee’s recommendations of contextualization and spun it into a wildly distorted narrative of “the evil liberals want to tear down all the monuments in D.C.!”

The Dark Side of Alexander Hamilton

Today is Independence Day, the day when the United States annually celebrates the approval of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776. (The congress had actually voted to declare independence from Britain two days earlier on July 2nd.)

Coinciding with the occasion, yesterday, Disney released a recording of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton on their streaming service Disney+. My family and I watched it together. I had listened to the soundtrack previously, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to actually see the show in any form.

Hamilton accurately captures some of Alexander Hamilton’s more obvious personality faults: his arrogance, his impulsiveness, his temper, his womanizing, and his tactlessness. Unfortunately, the musical glosses over some of his more troubling faults, most notably his authoritarian political leanings. In this article, I want to explore some of the overlooked flaws of the real-life Alexander Hamilton.

The Founding Fathers’ Views on Slavery

We have all heard that our country was founded on the idea that “all men are created equal.” That is certainly what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Unfortunately, ideas are often quite different from actions. The vast majority of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America owned slaves and, for many of them, their public statements stood in stark contrast with their own private actions and beliefs. Nonetheless, their views on the issue of slavery were actually quite diverse and many of them changed their views on the subject over the courses of their lives. In this article, we will examine the unvarnished truth of some of the major Founding Fathers’ views on slavery.

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