W&M alumni historians reflect on the 250th anniversary of the United States

Research & Scholarship

William & Mary alumni discuss the university's role as the Alma Mater of the Nation in this momentous year.

(Illustration by Laura Barrett)

The following excerpt is from a story that originally appeared in the spring 2026 issue of the W&M Alumni Magazine. - Ed.

In July 2026, the United States will celebrate 250 years of independence. At William & Mary, we have been reflecting on our university's role as the Alma Mater of the Nation in this momentous year.

William & Mary counts four presidents among its alumni, three of whom served during the founding and early republican eras: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe (the fourth, John Tyler, served just before the Civil War). The College Company - established by Patrick Henry on William & Mary's campus in October 1775, seven months after he delivered his famous "Give me liberty, or give me death!" speech at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia - participated in four documented military actions during the Revolution.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and fellow signers George Wythe, Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison V all shared close ties to William & Mary. Their lives reflected both the soaring aspirations and the unfinished complexities embedded within the nation's founding - including the enduring question of what the "pursuit of happiness" truly means, and for whom it must be realized in the continuing work toward a more perfect union.

Early American history isn't just a part of William & Mary's past; it's a critical part of the university's present and future as well. With the No. 1-ranked U.S. Colonial American history graduate program in the country and as the founding sponsor and host of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History & Culture, William & Mary is leading the way in understanding our nation's past and its connections to our present moment.

Historical scholarship is a conversation between experts, an exchange of ideas to approach as closely as possible to the most complete and accurate interpretation of the past. We gathered three historians of early America, all alumni of W&M's Harrison Ruffin Tyler Department of History, for a virtual conversation to reflect upon the founding of the United States 250 years ago.

• Emily Sneff Ph.D. '24 is an expert on the Declaration of Independence and a consulting curator for exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration at the Museum of the American Revolution and Historic Trappe. She is the author of "When the Declaration of Independence Was News," published by Oxford University Press in April, which follows how news of the Declaration of Independence spread to people throughout the United States and the world.

• Michael Blaakman '09 is an associate professor of early American history at Princeton University. His scholarship focuses on politics, empires and borderlands during the age of revolutions. His book, "Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic," was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023, and examines the wave of land speculation that swept the United States in the first quarter-century after its founding.

• Jim McClure M.A. '77, P '09 is the general editor of "The Papers of Thomas Jefferson," an editorial project at Princeton University that is preparing a comprehensive scholarly edition of documents written or received by Thomas Jefferson. He led the production of a digital exhibition on the Declaration of Independence in preparation for the 250th anniversary of the United States.

In their discussion, Sneff, Blaakman and McClure shared their perspectives on the nature of the historical craft, the composition of the Declaration of Independence and the meaning of the United States' 250th anniversary. An edited transcript of that conversation is below.

The United States declared its independence from Great Britain in a document signed by 56 delegates to the Continental Congress. One of those signers was George Wythe - a Williamsburg lawyer who became the first law professor in the 13 Colonies when W&M established its law school in 1779. Thomas Jefferson, who studied under Wythe before graduating from W&M in 1762 and later drafted the Declaration, called Wythe "my earliest and best friend … [to whom] I am indebted for first impressions which have had the most salutary influence on the course of my life."

Q. The Declaration of Independence is one of the foundational documents in the creation of the United States. Can you dissect this critical document for us?

McClure: There are really three pieces to the Declaration: the prelude, the grievances and the actual statement that says that we're now free and independent states. Everything in the document leading up to that statement of independence provides the background to be able to say: We're done with Britain. It's important to understand the Declaration as a functional document that has to introduce its reasoning for separation before the actual declaration of independence.

Sneff: It's absolutely true that the document itself was an action. Thomas Jefferson wrote to Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia signer of the Declaration, and tried to get him to agree that Congress butchered the Declaration with their edits of it. And Lee told Jefferson (and I'm paraphrasing here): "Yeah, they butchered it. But you know what? The Declaration in itself is what matters. We declared independence. That's the point." The document could have said anything, but the action it took was what was essential.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in June 1776 while renting the second floor of a house in Philadelphia. (Illustration by Laura Barrett)

The American Revolution was a foundational event in United States history, bringing 13 separate Colonies that were united only by their Colonial status to Great Britain into a signle political entity. Burned indelibly into American national memory, the Revolution has been researched by historians, studied by children across grade levels and mythologized in popular culture through literabure, film, theatre and art.

Q. What do you wish people understood better about the American Revolution and founding era?

Sneff: So often, the Revolution is broken down into a patriot-loyalist binary that is just not accurate to lived experience. If we get back to the letters, the diaries, the firsthand accounts of what people are experiencing, you find that a lot of people just wanted to keep living the way that they were. They didn't want to experience revolutionary change. I think that is a very relatable perspective for a lot of people today. They just want their families to be safe, their businesses to be successful and their religious communities not to be broken up by political moments.

It's also important to acknowledge that people's so-called loyalties were shifting, very much based on the direct impact that the Revolution was having on their life. Quakers in Philadelphia could coast along until they started being threatened, or members of their community were being expelled, or they had to deal with a British occupation of the city. And the same things were happening in other communities all over the East Coast.

Blaakman: One thing that I face with students coming into my classes all the time is that people tend to think that the colonists were aching to escape the big, bad tyrannical grasp of the British empire. But up until almost the very end, colonists were trying to fix the British Empire, not leave it. Up until late 1775 or very early 1776, independence was not the goal. Then suddenly it became the goal in a really fast turn of events.

This is to say that history changes very quickly. Attention to historical contingency is important for us as historians because it helps us build better arguments about change over time. But it's also something that I hope people will focus on at the 250th, because understanding how much history can change on a dime can be empowering, even if it's also a little unnerving at first. American independence was not inevitable. It was a last-minute decision. And when we recognize that the present wasn't inevitable, it helps us understand that the future isn't inevitable either, that it's ours to influence.

Sneff: Absolutely. And that people are the change-makers. That can be unsettling, but it also can be inspiring.

There are over two centuries of scholarship about the American Revolution. A 2019 review published by The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography estimates that there have been over 900 books written about George Washington alone. Over the course of two centuries, historians' interpretations of the events that shaped the Revolution and the people who lived through them have evolved.

Q. How have studies of the American Revolution changed or stayed the same over time?

Blaakman: Although our perspectives on them have changed dramatically over the years, I'd say our field centers on a set of enduring questions: Why did the American Revolution begin? What were its consequences? In what sense was it revolutionary? Who was it revolutionary for? Those are questions that were debated right from the era of the Revolution itself.

McClure: There has been a considerable deepening and broadening of questions, too. I was in grad school back during the U.S. bicentennial in 1976. Back then, what everybody understood and read about the American Revolution was all about texts and ideas of famous men. But there was also this big shift happening in history, of moving toward community-focused social history. We started asking questions like: How do we understand the experience of people who weren't writing famous texts and were not full participants in the political process? What was the revolutionary experience for them?

Blaakman: Yes, and that sense of whose stories matter has just kept expanding. So nowadays historians investigate the Revolution across lines of class and background and status - how women, and Native Americans and free and enslaved African Americans experienced the Revolution and influenced its course and meaning. The geography has expanded, too. We see the Revolution in the context of a broader Atlantic world, and a North American continent far beyond the seaboard. These evolving parameters are constantly changing the way we answer the big questions. One result in the latest scholarship is that the war itself has become much more central to the way we gauge the Revolution's impact than it was in the classic studies written in the 20th century, which focused mostly on intellectual and political history. The Revolution reached most ordinary people first and foremost as a war.

I think historians have also recently been trying to get past the dichotomies that structured the last century or so of debates about the Revolution: Was the Revolution sparked by political ideas, or was it sparked by material concerns? Was the outcome of the Revolution an expansion of political opportunity, or was it defined by the consolidation of elite power and wealth? A lot of new studies are finding ways to bridge those binaries or dissolve them. This is reflected, for instance, in recent scholarly energy on the histories of finance and money, which are political. Money is a political institution and a social institution.

Sneff: That makes me think about the museum exhibit that I'm working on at Historic Trappe in Pennsylvania. I suggested we include different currency as part of the exhibit, like Spanish coin and paper money. The rest of the curatorial team was curious when I suggested this, like, "Why do we want these pieces of money in the exhibit?" I said, "Because it's a political story. Because the choice of whether to consider a currency as valid or not reflected your own politics." And we have these examples of people grappling with this decision, but I still don't think it's an expected part of the interpretation.

Blaakman: We just had this conversation in my Revolution class the other day! We read an excerpt of the diary of Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker woman in Philadelphia, from the period of the British occupation of Philadelphia. She's Quaker, so she's studiously neutral, right? The first time you ask students the question, "What side is she on?" they quite fairly say, "Well, we don't really know that she's on any side." But there's a moment in the diary when she makes a deliberate choice to exchange Portuguese half joes - gold coins - for Continental dollars, the patriots' troubled paper money. And that is a political choice. The politics are inherent in the money.

Q. How do you see the commemorations for the 250th anniversary taking shape in the lead up to July 2026?

McClure: It's interesting that a lot of the really good, solid activity that's going on for the 250th is happening at individual institutions. Groups are finding their own way for this anniversary, because there isn't a national set of guidelines as to how one should observe this. And there are a lot of institutions that are working on exhibits. [The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, led by McClure, has produced a digital exhibit, and Blaakman curated an exhibition with Princeton University Library.]

Sneff: I've been really impressed to see the efforts being made by 250th commissions in some of the Western states, where the Revolution seems a little more remote than in the Eastern states. Hawaii's 250th Commission, for example, is organizing public readings on July 8, which was the day of the first formal public readings of the Declaration, at 6 p.m. Eastern time, which is a time at which everyone from Puerto Rico to Guam can participate.

Blaakman: I think that's a heartening takeaway, that so much good work is happening at the local level, and in particular institutions, and that the commemorative landscape is bigger than any political headwinds.

I also really hope that people use the 250th as an opportunity to learn more about individuals they have not heard of before, and how those lesser-known people experienced and navigated the tumult and the chaos and the fear and the violence and the promise and the possibility of the Revolution.

Sneff: The flip side of this is that there is also a history of civic action on the Fourth of July. We can look back to the centennial anniversary in 1876 when the National Women's Suffrage Association interrupted the formal ceremonial proceedings. There is a kind of duality for these anniversaries - where it brings people together but also invites people to push for more.

Q. What did civic leadership look like in the 18th century, and how does that compare to today?

McClure: Jefferson said much later that his task with the Declaration of Independence was to capture the sense of what was thought at the time. And Jefferson believed that there would be a relative unity of thought, that thoughtful people would agree on many things. That's kind of the Enlightenment view that he had. But he understood also that what he and the Continental Congress were doing was helping to shape what people thought and fought about. And so, in a way, they were guiding and showing people how the formation of an independent government is done. In all of the Colonies, there was a tradition and an understanding of how things got done - with civic leaders meeting together in assemblies and putting words down on paper and taking certain formal steps. So, in terms of current civic leadership, we need to continually remind ourselves that the words matter, and the formal instruments matter, to be effective.

Sneff: Williamsburg is a pretty good place to think about civic leadership. The resolution that ends up snowballing into the Declaration of Independence comes out of the Virginia Convention in 1776 in Williamsburg. There is a model, right down Duke of Gloucester Street at the Capitol, of taking action - not just making speeches or writing in private correspondence about what you wish might happen but actively pushing forward and banding together for the common good.

Blaakman: In the late 18th century, civic leadership was about disinterest and virtue and vigilance. And, if we're talking about after 1776, it was about an understanding that republican self-government is a very fragile thing. To add one more Jefferson example onto the pile here: In the exhibit that I've been working on at Princeton, we have a letter written by Jefferson during the ratification debate. He was in Paris at this point. He had to sit out the Constitutional Convention, which I think was a bit of a bummer for somebody who probably would have loved that intellectual exercise. Anyway, Jefferson gets a copy of the proposed Constitution, and he reads it and writes a letter with some of his opinions back to Uriah Forrest, a delegate to Congress from Maryland. Jefferson thought the Constitution was an improvement on the Articles of Confederation, but he also was a little bit apprehensive about it. As he saw it, the whole framework was rooted in a belief among the framers that subsequent rulers would be as virtuous or as honest as themselves. And he pointed to that as a flaw in the constitutional framework. I think that's a very explicit illustration of what civic leadership meant to somebody like Jefferson in the late 18th century, and it's an enduring reminder for us today.

Read the full story on the W&M Alumni Magazine website.

Annie Powell, University Marketing

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