The Untold History of Independence Day
Bio
Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. He recently retired after fifty years as a professor of history. Peter is the author of many books, including The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, and most recently, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance.
Transcript
The Untold History of Independence DayJAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore.
July 4 is celebrated here in the U.S. as Independence Day to mark the adoption of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain by the Second Continental Congress in 1776.
Now joining us to discuss the radical, little-known history of Independence Day is Peter Linebaugh. Peter is a historian and author. He just retired from the University of Toledo, where he taught for 20 years. He's the author of many books, including The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. He's also the author of the The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, as well as, most recently, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance.
Thank you so much for joining us, Peter.
PETER LINEBAUGH, AUTHOR, THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA: You're welcome, Jaisal.
LINEBAUGH: So, Peter, you know, in popular memory, this day, Independence Day, we remember the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but it was a long process that got the colonists to that point. Talk a little bit about the different political forces, social forces that helped get the US--and this was just within the first year or two of the Revolutionary War, but it had been a decade or longer that this conflict had been ongoing between the colonies and Great Britain. Talk about how we got to this point.
LINEBAUGH: Okay, Jaisal, I will talk about that, but it's hard. And even your question, you referred to how the U.S. got to this point, but, of course, it wasn't the U.S. at the time. The United States of America is an expression that Tom Payne invented and used to apply to what had been 13 colonies in revolt against Great Britain. So we're talking about an era before the U.S. has been formed. We're talking about a period of historical creation.
And it's complex. There are several sides to it. One side, it's the struggle of freedom against monarchy, a struggle of the notion of a republic against monarchy. And that is probably the principal theme of the Declaration of Independence.
I would suggest, you know, that people reread the Declaration of Independence, because they'll find 28 reasons for declaring independence from Great Britain. And these reasons reflect "a long train of abuses and usurpations" (or takeovers), to use Thomas Jefferson's language in the Declaration of Independence.
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