America 250

A patriot in an unsettled time

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 4th of July — which I recognize is a little odd, given that we’re barely into March. I have reasons.

This July 4 will mark the 250-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It’s one of those milestone birthdays, like the Big Five-O, where you look around with some satisfaction that you made it this far… and maybe, quietly, with some trepidation that things might be all downhill from here.

I am developing a Frontier Partisans Podcast series on the American Revolution on the frontier, a theater of war that devolved almost immediately into a savage existential conflict among American patriots (or rebels, depending on your political orientation), loyalists (or traitorous tories, depending upon your political orientation), and native peoples. The frontier theater used to be treated as a minor sideshow of the main conflict in the east, but it has been recognized in recent scholarship as critical both in the run-up to the conflict and in its outcome. Gaining a foothold west of the Appalachian Mountains guaranteed that the new United States would expand beyond the original 13 Colonies, march to the Mississippi and beyond, to ultimately become a continental empire.

More personally, my family and friends in Sisters are planning a celebration of life over the holiday weekend for my dad, who died last month at the age of 98, his lifespan covering almost 40 percent of the history of the Republic. Which is an astounding thing to contemplate…