New Yorker editor David Remnick recently interviewed the British historian Dominic Sandbrook and one of the topics was the American revolution and its miniscule place in British history textbooks. Sandbrook insisted that it’s not a question of sour grapes, because “there’s nothing the British like more than a tragic defeat.” The American revolution, he said, “is eclipsed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. There seems to be a parade of quite boring men talking very earnestly about liberty, battles that involve 20 people in a field somewhere in the great vastness of the American continent. It’s not Waterloo, it’s not Borodino.”
For an American used to the deification of the founding fathers, this was refreshing and rather amusing, particularly when delivered in a smart Oxbridge accent. But as I thought about it further, it seemed a glib caricaturing – about the personalities, not the battles – especially coming from a citizen of the land of Keir Starmer and Liz Truss. (Some might add Boris Johnson, though he is anything but boring.) More than that, it seemed a willful, if witty, denial of historical reality. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams - to name just three - were, even with all the mythologizing, remarkable men, part of a group that gave birth to what would become the richest and most powerful country in the world. Their achievement, their moment, should be more than a footnote in the British interpretation of history.
