Heather Cox Richardson Streamed live 6 hours ago In which I try to answer a different set of questions, today…. Topics covered in today’s Politics Chat: Declaration of Independence 250th anniversary, natural law and unalienable rights, consent of the governed, grievances against the King, dissolution of allegiance to the Crown, birth of a new nation.
Category Archives: History
How To Celebrate America’s 250th
Let’s remember what was revolutionary about the American Revolution.
by Paul Starr June 23, 2026 (Prospect.org)
This is the worst year—and a perfect time—to commemorate the American Revolution. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is arriving at a political moment wholly inconsistent with the Declaration itself. Our own leader is a would-be king, responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,” namely his own power and glory, which he confuses with the nation’s. “Neo-royalist” is an apt term for his conduct of the presidency and his posture toward the world.
Donald Trump has so thoroughly appropriated and degraded the celebration of the 250th that liberals and progressives may want to have nothing to do with it. But that’s a mistake. Precisely because America has strayed so far from its founding heritage, this is a perfect time to celebrate, reflect on our revolutionary beginning, and recognize what the Revolution achieved and what it didn’t.
The idea that the American Revolution wasn’t all that revolutionary has long had its advocates on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Some conservatives have argued that the Revolution aimed only to restore traditional British liberties, while some on the left have claimed that it only changed the form of government but left slavery undisturbed and even reinforced social inequalities.
Neither of those views gives the Revolution its due. Although it fell short of abolishing slavery, the Revolution did far more to advance freedom and equality than just restoring traditional liberties. It set in motion radical changes in both social life and government. This is the revolutionary heritage we should be celebrating.
The American colonies were societies of inherited rank, where a wide gulf separated the rich and well-born from commoners, and where colonists with connections to the Crown—future Loyalists—enjoyed patronage and privileges. Birth order remained a critical source of inequality: In much of colonial America, as in Britain, the eldest son in a wealthy family inherited the estate under rules of primogeniture and entail. That system of inheritance in Britain had for centuries locked up landed wealth and power in a small aristocracy.
Instead of a society stratified by inherited rank, the America that emerged from the Revolution outside the South was unusually fluid and open to mobility.
Cherished stories about the Puritans and other early settlers have misled us about the social status of most of those who crossed the Atlantic to the colonies. Data on colonial migrants on British ships show that the great majority came in an unfree condition. Most of the unfree were enslaved Africans, but more than half the whites arriving in the colonies south of New England came as indentured servants or convicts. Like the enslaved, they were bound to forced labor, subject to harsh control by their masters, and liable to be bought and sold. Unlike the enslaved, they were bound for a fixed period, generally five to seven years for indentured servants. At any one moment, according to the late historian Gordon Wood, about half the colonial population was legally unfree.
Revolutionary America began overturning these bases of social subordination. As Wood writes in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, “By the time the Revolution had run its course in the early nineteenth century, American society had been radically and thoroughly transformed.”
Amid all the contentious arguments about the Revolution’s impact, certain facts are beyond dispute. The reason the United States became divided between free and slave states is that the states in the North began abolishing slavery in the Revolutionary era, and Congress in 1787 prohibited slavery in the western territories north of the Ohio River. The Constitution barred titles of nobility, and the states in the following years did away with primogeniture and indentured servitude.
Instead of a society stratified by inherited rank, the America that emerged from the Revolution outside the South was unusually fluid and open to mobility. Ordinary white men had less reason to feel resigned to a status assigned them at birth. After visiting America in 1831-1832, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville reported that the equality of condition had unleashed a surge of energy, ambition, and frenetic activity in nearly every sphere, politics and civic associations as well as the economy.
Washington Irving’s 1819 short story “Rip Van Winkle” describes that postrevolutionary transformation. After falling into a deep sleep before the Revolution, Rip awakens 20 years later, enters his old village during an election, and discovers a changed world: “The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility.”
Under modern definitions, the early American republic would not qualify as a democracy because the majority of adults still had no right to vote, but the Revolution immediately created a more popular politics. One sign was a more plainspoken, easily grasped political language. Tom Paine’s Common Sense, the February 1776 pamphlet that set the colonies on the path to independence, also set the new standard for popular persuasion, appealing to what in the 18th century was just beginning to be called “public opinion.”
The new government fostered the expansion of the press and the public through the post office. Britain taxed newspapers to make them more expensive and prevent the rise of a dangerous popular press. Congress, however, starting in 1792, subsidized the distribution of newspapers with cheap postal rates and a right for printers to exchange copies free of postal charges. That was the basis for something extraordinary for its time, indeed any time: a government-subsidized but uncensored national news network. Unlike European countries, the United States also extended post roads and post offices to small towns and villages. Many people adopted a new habit, keeping up with the news.
By changing the system of government, the American Revolution had created a new political society. Strikingly, neither the growth of the press nor the energized public life and popular politics developed at that time in Canada, the part of British North America that hadn’t joined the Revolution and instead welcomed the fleeing Loyalists. When Britain’s Parliament granted Canada independence in 1867, it described the federation’s purpose as “Peace, Order, and good Government.”
The American Declaration of Independence had spelled out a different moral theory of government: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to secure men’s “unalienable Rights,” among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Those electrifying words, written under the immediate pressure to inspire men to risk their lives in war, did two things in the long run. They established founding principles, a founding promise. And they left America with a founding contradiction because the American republic in practice originally denied those rights to Black and indigenous people, women, and even white men without property.
Still, no matter the intent of the Declaration’s signers, their words defined the American project as many in later generations would come to understand it: fulfilling the promise and overcoming the contradiction. At Gettysburg, Lincoln said America was “dedicated” to a “proposition,” the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and that it was “for us the living … to be dedicated here to the unfinished work,” the work required for a “new birth of freedom.”
That conception of America and the continued meaning of the Declaration is not, however, universally held. Last July, JD Vance declared, “This country is not a contradiction … not some unfinished or contradictory project.” He was criticizing a post the previous day, July 4, by Zohran Mamdani, who had said: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished,” words that, in the vice president’s view, showed Mamdani’s lack of gratitude to earlier generations who had “turned [America’s] wilderness into the most powerful nation in the world.”
Vance was defending a different proposition from the one that Lincoln spoke about at Gettysburg. It’s the proposition that those who count America as their ancestral homeland going back to our early history—“heritage Americans,” some call them—have a singular “claim” to the nation: “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Of course, neither Mamdani nor liberals who define the core of American identity by its founding ideals say that people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War “don’t belong.” What they say is that America still has work to do to make good on its founding promise.
Donald Trump’s monarchical presidency has made that work more urgent. Unlike originalists in the law, Trump’s governing philosophy might be described as “pre-originalist”: a return to rule by proclamation and prerogative, the very thing America’s founders abhorred and tried to prevent through constitutional restraints. This year’s anniversary ought to reawaken that foundational opposition to arbitrary, personal rule, slumbering in the hearts of the president’s supporters.
The world will surely “little note, nor long remember” what any of us say at the celebrations this July. But it will again be true that it is for “us the living” to do the unfinished work that freedom perennially requires. All those who take up that challenge can count themselves heritage Americans and celebrate the 250th in a spirit faithful to the Declaration.
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Paul Starr
Paul Starr is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American history, he is the author of eight books, including American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now (Yale University Press, October 2025). More by Paul Starr
Spiritual Awakening in the Italian Renaissance with Betty Kovács
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jun 10, 2026 Betty J. Kovács, PhD, taught symbolic and mythic language for twenty-five years. She has served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Jung Society of Claremont, California, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of Forever Family Foundation. Dr. Kovacs is author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, winner of The Scientific and Medical Network 2019 Book Prize and a Nautilus Silver Award. She has also written The Miracle of Death: There Is Nothing But Life. Her website is www.kamlak.com. Here she describes the Italian Renaissance as a time when people began to celebrate the beauty of the human body, the dignity of worldly human life, and the potential of people to reach for new cultural accomplishments – while remaining mindful of the divinity within, as expressed in the art and insights of the High Middle Ages. Hermeticism and kabbalah were part of this awakening that was largely stimulated by a growing awareness of ancient cultures. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on January 24, 2021)
The Hidden Founders of American Democracy | Native America
PBS Documentaries May 18, 2026 Watch more with PBS Passport: https://to.pbs.org/2DdzTCv Explore the rise of great American nations, from monarchies to democracies. Investigate lost cities in Mexico, a temple in Peru, a potlatch ceremony in the Pacific Northwest and a tapestry of shell beads in upstate New York whose story inspired our own democracy. [Originally aired in 2018] Nature to Nations | Native America This program is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station: https://www.pbs.org/donate Enjoy full episodes of your favorite PBS shows anytime, anywhere with the free PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2QbtzhR
The American Revolution | Full Episode 1 | In Order to Be Free (May 1754 – May 1775) | PBS
Ken Burns and PBS May 25, 2026 Watch more with Passport: https://to.pbs.org/amrevpbs American colonists oppose efforts by the British Crown and Parliament to seize greater control in North America, escalating simmering tensions over land, taxes, and sovereignty into violent confrontation. After protestors dump tea in Boston Harbor, the British government enacts martial law in Massachusetts. Fighting at Lexington and Concord ignites a war that will last eight years. Episode 1: In Order to Be Free (May 1754 – May 1775) | The American Revolution This program is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station: https://www.pbs.org/donate Enjoy full episodes of your favorite PBS shows anytime, anywhere with the free PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2QbtzhR
The Civil War | Full Episode 1 | 1861: “The Cause” | PBS
Ken Burns Jun 1, 2026 Watch more with Passport: https://to.pbs.org/3SwZLNS Beginning with a searing indictment of slavery, this first episode dramatically evokes the causes of the war, from the Cotton Kingdom of the South to the northern abolitionists who opposed it. Here are the burning questions of Union and states’ rights, John Brown at Harpers Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the firing on Fort Sumter, and the jubilant rush to arms on both sides. 1861: “The Cause” | The Civil War This program is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station: https://www.pbs.org/donate Enjoy full episodes of your favorite PBS shows anytime, anywhere with the free PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2QbtzhR
Spiritual Awakening in the High Middle Ages with Betty J. Kovács
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 30, 2026 Betty J. Kovács, PhD, taught symbolic/mythic language for twenty-five years. She has served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Jung Society of Claremont, California, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of Forever Family Foundation. Dr. Kovacs is author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, winner of The Scientific and Medical Network 2019 Book Prize and a Nautilus Silver Award. She has also written The Miracle of Death: There Is Nothing But Life. Her website is www.kamlak.com. Here she points out that the High Middle Ages, starting around 1000 AD, represented an awakening from the Dark Ages when Europe was dominated by the repressive policies of the Church. Stories of the Holy Grail inspired Europeans with a new sense of reverence for the feminine and a quest for the spiritual. Building the great cathedrals, full of esoteric symbolism, became the major economic activity of the era. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). (Recorded on May 11, 2020)
France’s parliament votes to repeal slavery-era Black Code, with tears and history in the chamber
By THOMAS ADAMSON May 28, 2026 (APNews.com)
PARIS (AP) — For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property has remained quietly on the books. On Thursday, the lower house of parliament voted to wipe it from French law.
The National Assembly voted 254-0 — a rare show of unanimity — to adopt a bill repealing Code Noir, or Black Code, the 1685 decree King Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across France’s colonies.
The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and murdered.
And the realization that France never formally did away with it left many aghast. Debate in the chamber turned raw on Thursday.
Steevy Gustave — a lawmaker descended from enslaved people on the Caribbean island of Martinique, now a French overseas department — told colleagues that the repeal was necessary, “but no vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives.”
“We are not descendants of slaves,” he said, bursting into tears. “We are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst — reduced to slavery.”
The code’s reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved “movable property” — assets a master could acquire like real estate. Those who fled faced branding, the amputation of their ears, and even death. The word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.
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Code Noir’s 60 articles “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” in the 19th century, President Emmanuel Macron said last week.
“The silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight,” Macron said. “It has become a form of offense.”
Like French presidents before him, Macron stopped short of an apology.
France ran the third-largest slave trade, shipping about 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar wealth built the French cities of Nantes and Bordeaux. The French empire later spanned four continents.
Others see the repeal as something more telling — a symptom, they argue, of a country that has yet to reckon fully with that past, one of many slow steps along the way.
Calls for France to face its past
In law, officially eliminating it is the easy part, observers say. Code Noir lost all authority in 1848, when France abolished slavery.
France didn’t relinquish its slave colonies: the four oldest — Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion — were made full French overseas departments in 1946. That means they’re governed from Paris like any other.
Their roughly 1.9 million people, most descended from the enslaved, are French citizens.
Despite being fully part of France, the overseas departments remain among its poorest territories. Unemployment runs roughly double the mainland rate, and more than three-quarters of households in the Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte live below the national poverty line.
Shocked to find the law wasn’t annulled
Before he discovered the truth, the French lawmaker who put forward the proposal to repeal the law didn’t know it still existed.
Max Mathiasin, from Guadeloupe, had bought copies of the text over the years and left them on his shelf.
“As the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full,” he said. “This was made by human beings — against human beings.”
For him, the vote is “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity” before a France whose motto is liberty, equality, fraternity. “It means living up to the Republican promise.”
That promise, he says, is still unkept at home.
“In Guadeloupe,” Mathiasin said, “in the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are white.”
A colonial exception that never ended
The Foundation for the Memory of Slavery is chaired by a former prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and its deputy director is Pierre-Yves Bocquet — both white men.
Bocquet calls Code Noir the birthplace of France’s “colonial exception” — the principle that the French Republic’s founding rights could be suspended for those under its rule.
The principle outlived the empire, he said: “Even today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.”
France is hardly the only country still holding fragments of empire — the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands still have overseas territories.
But what sets France apart, observers say, is that it made its slave colonies equal departments of the Republic, not dependencies it governs from afar.
The state insists that the overseas departments are France like anywhere else, even as the people who live there say they are treated as less.
Most major colonial powers, including Britain, Spain and Portugal, had laws governing slavery in their colonies. In each case, those laws fell away when slavery itself was abolished, leaving no single text to repeal.
France’s Code Noir was different, experts say: a single, named royal law that no one ever formally erased, even after France abolished slavery.
France is ‘still in a form of apartheid’
For Max Relouzat, 81, president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries, the repeal matters, because so little else has.
His African ancestor had no name under the law, only a number and a registration code — the family that lived in Martinique was given the name Relouzat at emancipation, likely after Nelouzat, a village in the Auvergne region of central France.
What galls him, he said, is what the symbolism leaves untouched: systemic racism in France.
“Under the cover of departmentalization, a colonial system was maintained,” Relouzat said. “If the overseas departments are part of France, why is there a ministry for the overseas?”
In France, he said, “we are still today in a form of apartheid … a form of colonial continuity.”
‘Racism is the legacy of slavery itself’
For some who have fought longest, Thursday isn’t the milestone it appears.
For Florence Alexis, a slavery expert and daughter of the Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, the real turning point came 25 years ago. In 2001, the Taubira law made France the first country to call the slave trade, and slavery, crimes against humanity.
“That is what changed my life,” Alexis said.
For her, racism is the legacy of slavery itself, not of one edict.
“When I was a child at school, they called me the little monkey,” she said. “People made animal cries when I walked past — as they still do in football stadiums today.”
Paris-born Élodie Léon, 29, whose family is from French Guiana, welcomes the repeal, but resents the delay.
“Symbolic neglect is also neglect,” she said.
“It shocks me,” said Muriel Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-born nurse whose parents are from Martinique. “A law that treated Black people as property was left sitting there.”
The history of reparations
At the Taubira law’s 25th anniversary on May 21, Macron floated the idea of reparations — something that France has long stayed away from addressing.
He called it “a question we must not refuse,” but one on which “we must not make false promises.”
He committed no money, instead defining repair first as truth-telling, education and historical work.
The wealthiest of France’s plantations were in Saint-Domingue, in the Caribbean, where the enslaved rose up and won independence in 1804 as Haiti. France then forced the freed to pay reparations for the loss of their masters — a debt cleared only in 1947.
France isn’t alone. In the United States, federal reparations legislation has stalled for decades. California approved an apology, but no cash.
But the timing of Macron’s latest speech was awkward. Two months earlier, France abstained when the U.N. General Assembly voted 123-3, with 52 abstentions, to call the trans-Atlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.
And this month at the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya, days after declaring himself a “pan-Africanist,” Macron seized a microphone and ordered the room to quiet down.
“As soon as he sets foot on the African continent,” French opposition lawmaker Danièle Obono said, “he can’t help but behave like a colonizer.”
The repeal of the nCode Noir, said Bocquet, “will have no direct effect.” Whether it helps France fight racism and inequality in its overseas territories, he said, “remains to be seen.”
“It is easy for the French authorities, and for Macron, to do this,” Alexis added. “Because it commits them to nothing.”
Adamson is a foreign reporter based in Paris for The Associated Press. He covers European politics, culture and style. He has reported across the continent in an over two-decade career.