April 13, 2022 - WASHINGTON — Dustin Thompson’s trip down what he called “the rabbit hole” of election misinformation began eight months before a single vote was cast in 2020. It ended inside the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where he was part of the mob of Trump supporters that stormed inside during Congress’s counting of electoral votes in the worst attack on the building since the War of 1812.

An exterminator from Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Thompson, 38, was laid off in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Alone at home with his new wife, he began spending long days on the internet, steeping himself in conspiracy theories about the upcoming vote.

As the election approached, he said, he fully believed that if Donald J. Trump ended up losing, it would only be because the voting had been rigged, as the president had been warning publicly for months. Even after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner, Mr. Thompson could not accept that it was true.

All of this, he told a jury at his criminal trial on Wednesday, led him to Washington on Jan. 6 for a Stop the Steal rally, where he and a friend listened to Mr. Trump give an incendiary speech near the White House.

In an hour on the witness stand, Mr. Thompson blamed Mr. Trump for what eventually occurred, saying that he had been answering the president’s call to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” when he joined the throng swarming into the building and made off with a bottle of bourbon and a coat rack.

“If the president’s giving you almost an order to do something,” he said, “I felt obligated to do that.”

Mr. Thompson’s story is not unusual. At several points during the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack, many people charged with crimes have sought to blame Mr. Trump in various ways for their actions, mostly at pretrial bail hearings or at sentencings after pleading guilty.

But Mr. Thompson is the first defendant to attempt the argument at trial in front of a jury. In making his case, he offered a window into the toxic and relentless flood of conspiracy theories and lies, stoked by Mr. Trump, that helped give rise to the riot.

The move comes with considerable risk, and its success or failure could determine not only Mr. Thompson’s fate, but that of other defendants accused of taking part in the violence of Jan. 6.

Before the trial began, Mr. Thompson admitted to prosecutors that he had gone into the Capitol and stolen government property, agreeing in advance to nearly every element of the six charges he faces. His defense will rest almost entirely on the question of his state of mind during the riot.

Mr. Thompson has claimed that he did not knowingly or corruptly break the law, but rather, as his lawyer said on Tuesday, was “so influenced — so used and abused” by Mr. Trump that he could not be held accountable for his behavior.

The Trump-made-me-do-it defense has not fared well with judges. While it could work better on a jury, Mr. Thompson seemed to stumble on Wednesday during cross-examination, undercutting key elements of his argument.

William Dreher, a prosecutor, got him to admit several times that Mr. Trump had not been at his side, offering him step-by-step instructions, when he walked into the Senate parliamentarian’s office and walked out with the whiskey and the coat rack. Mr. Thompson acknowledged that he was a married adult with a college degree who could make his own decisions.

Mr. Thompson also conceded under questioning by Mr. Dreher that he had known it was unlawful to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6 while lawmakers were finalizing the results of the election. That appeared to contradict a central pillar of his own defense.

While Mr. Thompson’s claims that he was under Mr. Trump’s spell do not carry any legal weight as evidence, they echo similar allegations the government has made in other cases connected to Jan. 6. In those cases, prosecutors have gone to great lengths to describe how rioters at the Capitol were motivated by Mr. Trump’s statements, including his speech at the Ellipse and a tweet he posted on Dec. 19, 2020 calling on his followers to attend a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6. ...Read More

April 9, 2022 - Just before the Senate Judiciary Committee voted, this week, on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court—one of the final hurdles before her confirmation by the full Senate, on Thursday—Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, offered a personal reminiscence from the hearings. “I got an opportunity during one of the breaks to go up to her parents, and I told them that they clearly raised her right,” Tillis said. “They should be very proud.”

Then he voted against her, after a multiday spectacle during which Republican senators portrayed Jackson as a “dangerous” judge engaged in an extremist mission to undermine public safety on behalf of child-sex offenders, terrorists, and shadowy moneyed figures on the far left. Indeed, Tillis’s admiration for parents who had reared such a purported threat to the Republic would be befuddling if the falsity of the attacks against her were not so evident. The real mystery is why the senator thought that he had the standing to offer Jackson’s parents anything other than an apology.

Ellery and Johnny Brown, two teachers who became, respectively, a high-school principal and a lawyer, raised a daughter who is now the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court in its two-hundred-and-thirty-three-year history. (She will not be sworn in right away; Justice Stephen Breyer, whom she will succeed and for whom she once clerked, plans to serve until the end of the Court’s term this summer.) None of her achievements, from her Harvard degrees to her time as a federal public defender and a judge, is news to them. She is a highly qualified jurist who has the respect of liberal and conservative colleagues. Jackson and President Joe Biden watched together from the White House as the Senate voted, and their expressions as the ayes came in—the final tally was 53–47—conveyed joy and relief that the ugly part was over, at least for Jackson.

The rest of the country may not be so lucky. The manner in which the Republican Party’s elected leaders approached the confirmation—feverishly and recklessly, with little regard for the costs—offered a dispiriting prelude to how Congress may operate if, as seems all too possible, the G.O.P. takes control of either chamber or both, in the midterm elections this fall.

Republicans’ claims about Jackson’s sentencing in child-pornography cases were especially detached from reality: her record is well in the mainstream relative to that of other federal judges. In attempting to slander her, Republican senators may also have done damage in the broader area of criminal-justice reform, dismissing all notions of judicial discretion and proportionality, let alone rehabilitation. At times, they seemed more like a focus group testing Democrats-are-soft-on-crime campaign ads than like legislators providing advice or consent. At one point, Ted Cruz suggested that supporting Jackson was comparable to calling for the police to be abolished.

If some senators, such as Cruz and Josh Hawley, seemed especially eager to enmesh themselves in conspiracy theories (the concept that the Democratic Party is one big child-trafficking ring is a QAnon tenet), the attacks were a group effort. The hearings further erased the distinction between senior Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, such as Chuck Grassley, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said that the three G.O.P. senators who voted to confirm Jackson—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney—were “pro-pedophile.”

In a speech on the Senate floor the day before the confirmation vote, Tom Cotton, after a mini-rant about the sentencing issue, said, “Judge Jackson has also shown real interest in helping terrorists.” By this he meant that, as a federal public defender and, to a lesser extent, in private practice, she had worked on the cases of four men detained at Guantánamo Bay. None of them was ever put on trial. Cotton was particularly exercised that some of the briefs she filed on the men’s behalf contained allegations that they had been subjected to “American war crimes.”

The crimes alleged were torture, something that the Senate itself has documented with regard to a number of Guantánamo detainees—raising the question of whether Cotton thinks that torture isn’t a crime, or if he believes that a lawyer who wants to be on the Supreme Court should pretend that such things never happen. Either position is perilous. Cotton continued, “The last Judge Jackson”—Robert H. Jackson—“left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them.”

Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton who has written extensively on war crimes, observed that Cotton invoked Robert Jackson “understanding nothing about what he did at Nuremberg. Justice Jackson negotiated the rules which gave the Nazi defendants the right to defense counsel, and in his opening address emphasized that they would get ‘a fair opportunity to defend themselves.’ ” One of his most enduring opinions was his passionate dissent in the Korematsu case, from 1944, in which the Supreme Court, to its shame, effectively sanctioned the internment of Americans of Japanese descent. (The Court finally renounced the decision in 2018, when Donald Trump’s efforts to institute a “Muslim ban” made it newly relevant.) Robert Jackson called the internment “racial discrimination,” and warned of the danger of putting aside constitutional rights in the name of wartime exigency. It’s Ketanji Brown Jackson who is carrying on his legacy—not Cotton.

Some senators used the hearings to practice other electoral gambits, including those related to gender identity, a topic currently providing campaign fodder for Republicans such as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Jackson to define “woman.” After the judge demurred—a reasonable move, given the biological and legal complexities—Blackburn and her colleagues practically exulted. Cruz asked Jackson how she could possibly rule on cases involving gender if she couldn’t “determine what a woman was.”

“Senator, I know that I am a woman,” Jackson told him. “I know that Senator Blackburn is a woman. And the woman I admire most in the world is in the room today—my mother.” It was an answer that reached not only back to her childhood but to a declaration often attributed to Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a woman?,” and forward to what, with any luck, will be decades on the Court. Amid all the partisan noise, Jackson had her own message. She knows who she is, and doesn’t need any senator to tell her.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014. She has been at the magazine since 1995, and, as a senior editor for many years, focussed on national security, international reporting, and features.

These rightwing forces represent a threat to the future of a multiethnic Ukraine. They have pushed for terrible language laws that discriminate against Russian speakers. Not only are these wrong, but they will also feed the narrative of the Russian separatists. ...Read More

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In the early 1940s, in between performing classics like “Ol’ Man River” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the African American singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson liked to surprise concertgoers with the somber melody and defiant lyrics of “Chee Lai!” — or “March of the Volunteers.” Singing in flawless Chinese, Robeson hoped to show solidarity with China in its struggle against Japan.

Robeson began singing “Chee Lai!” at the apex of his fame, after being introduced to the song by Liu Liangmo, a Chinese musician and journalist he met in New York City in 1940. The two men became fast friends, forming a musical partnership that culminated in the release of the album “Chee Lai: Songs of New China” the following year.

The story of Robeson and “Chee Lai!” is just one of the Chinese-African American encounters explored by Gao Yunxiang in her new book, “Arise, Africa! Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century.” A professor of history at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, Gao has spent the last two decades teaching and researching modern Chinese social and cultural history from a transnational perspective.

Gao’s first book, “Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making During China’s National Crisis, 1931-45,” examines how Chinese female celebrity athletes navigated rapidly shifting gender norms amid the war against Japan. In her new book, Gao shifts her focus from gender to race, tracing the intertwined lives of five global citizens of the 20th century: three African Americans — W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes — and two lesser-known Chinese — Sylvia Si-lan Chen and Liu Liangmo.

All five traversed the world, expanding their networks and nurturing a sense of shared destiny among the millions of people living under colonialism and imperialism, even as they struggled to navigate the increasingly muddy waters of trans-Pacific politics. Together, they form the missing link between China’s crusade for national liberation and Black freedom struggles in the African continent and diaspora.

In an interview conducted over email, Gao shared the details of her research process and of the lives of the central figures of her book. The first part of the interview covers the book’s genesis, the engagement between intellectuals of African American and Chinese descent, and how these engagements altered perceptions on either side of the Pacific. The second part of the interview, to be published tomorrow, will explore the challenges of trans-Pacific solidarity and how her subjects’ stories are relevant to contemporary Sino-American relations.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Liu Zifeng: How did you get interested in the ties between Chinese and African Americans? What inspired you to write “Arise Africa! Roar China!”?

Gao Yunxiang: While conducting research on my first book, “Sporting Gender,” I came across laudatory articles on W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in The People’s Daily. They reminded me of some things I read in my childhood: specifically, an old newspaper article and a propaganda poster.

In my childhood home in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, our ceiling was a flat lattice of wooden boards pasted over with old newspapers purchased in bulk. After I learned to read and write, I was confronted every night by a headline pasted right above my pillow — until it was covered by a new layer of old newspapers the following Lunar New Year. Since I read those words daily, they were inscribed in my brain: “Robert Williams and Madam Du Bois Fervently Acclaim Chairman Mao’s Statement Supporting Black Americans’ Struggle Against Violent Repression.”

That title is in turn connected to the memory of a poster that hung in our little classroom for 18 students between grades one to three. Advocating solidarity in the liberation struggle, the poster featured indignant men and women of various ethnicities, all dressed in vibrant clothing and charging forward, with a muscular Black man holding a gun at the center.

“Sporting Gender” was released in 2013. Around the same time, I published an article in the journal Du Bois Review that explored how W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois’ endeavors in Maoist China added new dimensions to Sino-American relations and Black internationalism. Working on that article, I naturally came across Paul Robeson, a close ally of the Du Boises. Then, while researching the fascinating yet unknown dynamics between Paul Robeson and China, I came across his Chinese allies: Liu Liangmo and Sylvia Si-lan Chen.

Of course, I was immediately curious about who they were. While looking into Chen, I learned that Langston Hughes was her lover. So, I traced these figures just like interlocked chains.

Gao: Solidarity between people of color globally and their shared destiny of anti-racism and anti-colonialism attracted these figures’ attention to China. As a minority facing overwhelming state-imposed systematic racism and white supremacy, Black intellectuals and activists looked toward the similarly oppressed China for inspiration and strength.

These figures’ ties with leftist Chinese and China were built on a profound emotional and intellectual foundation. They shared a faith in Sino-Afro racial, linguistic, philosophical, and artistic kinship. Hughes observed Chinese to be “a very jolly people, much like colored folks at home”; Du Bois lauded Chinese as “my physical cousins.”

Both Du Bois and Robeson consistently articulated the linkage between African and Chinese civilizations and cited famous Chinese cultural giants such as Confucius and Laozi to argue for the sophistication of African civilization, counter negative stereotypes associated with perceived African “primitivism,” and debunk white supremacism.

Cultural kinship necessitated a political alliance. By embracing China’s revolutions as vehicles for the social and economic uplift of nonwhites, Black intellectuals directly linked the struggles of African Americans with those of nationalist Chinese. Hughes’ 1933 journey to “incredible” Shanghai made him the first Black intellectual celebrity to set foot on Chinese soil. He was profoundly sympathetic to China’s suffering under colonial oppression, especially Japan’s latest aggressions. Hughes would pen a passionate poem, “Roar, China!” following Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937, lionizing China’s resistance.

The Communist victory in 1949 made China a pillar of nonwhite peoples’ revolutionary struggles and a model for millions to beat colonialism. Robeson romantically imagined that the nonwhite world would view the rising China as a “new star of the East… pointing the way out from imperialist enslavement to independence and equality. China has shown the way.”

During his epic China trip in 1959, Du Bois repeatedly proclaimed Chinese and African dignity and unity in the face of Western racism, colonialism, and capitalism: “Africa, Arise, and stand straight, speak and think! Turn from the West and your slavery and humiliation for the last 500 years and face the rising sun ... China is flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood.” He predicted that the “darker world” would adopt socialism as “the only answer to the color line,” and that the status of African Americans would thereby be elevated.

Despite withdrawing from radicalism due to anti-Communist hysteria in the United States, Hughes nevertheless remained confident of the power of the People’s Republic of China. His suppressed inspiration, drawn from the Chinese Communist Party, resurfaced in his fury at the brutal racial violence African Americans suffered. “Birmingham Sunday,” Hughes’ eulogy to the four Black girls killed in the dynamiting of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15, 1963, connected his rage with the rage one once felt by oppressed Chinese.

Gao: The Chinese intelligentsia had, through literature and drama, long connected the shared “enslavement” of the Chinese nation as a semi-colony state and the enslavement of African Americans. In the introduction to their 1901 translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Lin Shu and Wei Yi argue that the tortures “yellow” people faced were even worse than those endured by Black Americans. Chinese people needed to read the book, Liu and Wei write, because “slavery is looming for our race. We had to yell and scream to wake up the public.” ...Read Moreforged a bond that would last decades.

These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!

Tune of the Week: Pradogrande 'Proud Mary'  ...12 minutes

April 08, 2022 - In Kong Dashan’s hit new movie “Journey to the West,” the aliens aren’t hiding in the corn fields of the U.S. Midwest. They’re lurking in the villages of northern China. 

The film has become a sensation on the festival circuit in recent months by offering audiences something rarely seen before: a science fiction tale with a distinctly local flavor. 

Tang Zhijun, a middle-aged magazine editor from Beijing, travels to a remote village to investigate the mass sighting of an unidentified flying object. There, he meets a local poet who says the answer to the mystery lies at a distant mountain.

As the tension mounts, the pair embark on a road trip that turns into a journey of self-discovery. It’s a quirky, often comic narrative that echoes the original “Journey to the West,” the classic Chinese novel about the monk Tang Sanzang’s quest to retrieve the Buddhist scriptures from India.

Last October, the film scooped an unprecedented four awards — including best film — at the Pingyao International Film Festival, China’s leading platform for independent cinema. It has since played overseas at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Osaka Asian Film Festival to more acclaim. 

With a Chinese theatrical release pending, film industry insiders say the buzz building around the feature is palpable. Kong, the film’s 32-year-old director, says the movie’s low-budget, down-to-earth style has proved to be an asset.

“We have given people science fiction within a story that might feel familiar to aspects of their own lives,” says Kong. “That is something new.” 

Leading figures in China’s science fiction scene have hailed “Journey to the West” as a step forward for the industry — and a sign it’s finally ready to step out of the shadow of star author Liu Cixin.

Chinese sci-fi has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, propelled by the breakout success of Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem.” The novel, which transcends time and space as it charts humanity’s war against an alien civilization, became a global sensation after winning the prestigious Hugo Award in 2015.

The Chinese government, once wary of sci-fi movies, began to actively embrace the genre as a soft power tool over the following years. This has opened the door for a string of big-budget science fiction productions, many of them drawing inspiration from Liu’s work.

In 2019, “The Wandering Earth” — an adaptation of a Liu novella about a group of astronauts trying to save the planet from destruction — became a box office smash, generating 4.4 billion yuan (then $638 million) in ticket sales and winning a slew of local awards.

Other Chinese sci-fi films to attract big audiences that year included the wacky comedy “Crazy Alien” — also based on a story by Liu — and the special effects-heavy alien invasion movie “Shanghai Fortress.” 

Though the pandemic has caused major disruptions to film production in China, a big-budget sequel to “The Wandering Earth” is set for release in 2023. Streaming giants Tencent and Netflix, meanwhile, are currently putting the finishing touches on a TV adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem.” 

Liu continues to loom large over China’s sci-fi scene. His style of fiction — speculative, epic in scale, and informed by hard science — has influenced an entire generation of Chinese writers. 

“Currently, I see a lot of physics, astronomy, and space — natural science stuff,” says Chen Qiufan, a leading sci-fi author and honorary president of the Chinese Science Fiction Writers’ Association. “It’s pretty much like America back in the ’50s. Like (Isaac) Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, those ‘golden-age’ authors.” 

But there are signs this is starting to change. Some creators are starting to experiment with a folksier style of sci-fi — one that draws more heavily on China’s cultural heritage and current affairs. For Chen, it’s part of a movement to explore “what are the Chinese characteristics of sci-fi.” 

“Maybe in the future, there’ll be something different,” he says. “I might also do some exploration myself to connect with some ancient Chinese philosophy and mythology … so the work is using a different kind of language.” 

Filmmaker Kong appears to be ahead of the game. “Journey to the West” turns on the travails of its relatable main character and his search for answers: not only about what might lie in the great beyond, but also about how his own life has panned out. 

It’s a work that comes steeped in the traditional themes found in science fiction, such as the search for redemption and humanity’s fascination with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Kong says his inspiration came from the hours he spent poring over sci-fi magazines as a child growing up in 1990s Shandong, a province in eastern China. 

“My generation all grew up reading science fiction magazines, books about unknown mysteries,” says Kong. “If we think carefully about what aliens represent, it’s actually another kind of system, totally different from human beings’ existence.” 

As opposed to Liu Cixin, whose work is often compared to the “golden age” sci-fi authors of the 1940s and ’50s, Kong’s work shows faint echoes of more recent classics. The central character — played by veteran actor Yang Haoyu — is fixated with outer space while his real life on terra firma falls apart, much like the protagonist in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 masterpiece “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” As in that film, too, there’s a journey of discovery that’s as personal as it is otherworldly.  

But there are also sly nods to arguably the greatest road trip of all — the one taken by Tang Sanzang and his three disciples in the original “Journey to the West.” In Kong's feature, however, the characters’ quest for fulfillment is rooted in a firmly contemporary setting. 

“In both that book and my film, you have characters looking for the ultimate answers in life,” says Kong. “I think this comes from the influence of ‘Journey to the West’ subconsciously. It’s a road trip, but inside it’s also his own mental journey. I think it’s necessary to have this kind of journey in science fiction.” 

The hope is that more Chinese filmmakers find opportunities to experiment with science fiction over the next few years. Chen, the author, says the outlook for Chinese sci-fi has never looked better, especially given the government’s embrace of the genre. 

“There have been themes of science fiction in China for about 100 years, but they’ve not been continuously developed because of wars or due to political reasons,” says Chen. “But (now) seems to be a golden age because it’s top-down. We have got a lot of support from the government and, also, the market is ready.” 

Chinese authorities are pouring resources into science-fiction-related projects. Next year, the southwestern city of Chengdu will host the influential World Science Fiction Convention. Officials have greenlit a massive $8 billion Paramount Park theme park in Kunming, another city in southwest China, which will include a zone themed around the “Star Trek” franchise.

In 2019, the government also helped launch the Chinese Science Fiction Academy at Chengdu’s Sichuan University, a facility whose stated mission is to develop “a sci-fi theoretical system with Chinese characteristics.” Last year, researchers estimated that China’s sci-fi industry was worth a massive 36.3 billion yuan in the first half of 2021.

The scene is also benefitting from the growing demand for sci-fi movies among young Chinese, Chen says. Unlike previous generations, who often didn’t have easy access to science fiction, Chinese millennials like Kong grew up immersed in sci-fi culture. 

“So many in the younger generation are so passionate about sci-fi as a genre, no matter if it’s literature, movies, or video games,” says Chen. “I think that’s been a fundamental change, because in the ’80s, or even in the ’50s and ’60s, maybe people weren’t ready yet for science fiction.” ...Read More

APRIL 4, 2022 - To the surprise and consternation of scholars, history has recently emerged as a battlefield in the ongoing culture wars. Generally, historians welcome public debate about the past.

But new state laws banning from classrooms any discussion of the history of racism have been accompanied by so much demagoguery and misinformation on the part of legislators, school board officials, and agitated parents that one is tempted to believe it would be more edifying to ignore history altogether for the time being.

In these debates, the American Revolution plays an outsize role. The 1619 Project, which began life as a special issue of The New York Times Magazine consisting of scholarly essays about the roots and persistence of racial inequality, has become a focal point for patriotic outrage. The project posits that given the centrality of slavery and its legacy to American development, 1619—the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in colonial Virginia—is a more appropriate starting point for understanding the American experience than 1776, the date of the Declaration of Independence.

Republicans seeking to galvanize their base have latched on to “1619” as a catchall term for what they claim is a campaign by teachers to denigrate the country’s founders. In the waning weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump, not previously known for an interest in American history, established the 1776 Commission, charged with promoting “patriotic education.” According to the Trump White House, the commission’s spare report—it ran to only 20 pages—offered a “definitive chronicle of the American founding” to counteract those historians who were said to instruct students that the United States “is not an exceptional country but an evil one.” Ultimately at issue is not simply what students should learn about the past, but the nature of American society today.

Since well before the current controversy, Woody Holton, who teaches at the University of South Carolina, has been engaged in a different but related debate over how best to understand the American Revolution, including its relationship to slavery. A leading practitioner of what is sometimes called “history from below,” Holton has charged that too many historians, fixated on the words and actions of a few well-known leaders, ignore how less prominent Americans, including lower-class whites, Native Americans, and the roughly half-million slaves, powerfully affected the struggle for independence. Holton’s first book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia, published in 1999, contended that pressure from below “forced” a reluctant elite to embrace independence.

Over a century ago, the historian Carl Becker remarked that the American Revolution had two components: the contest with Great Britain over “home rule” and an internal struggle over political and economic power—or the question of who should rule at home. In the past few decades, as part of a broader shift in historical scholarship, the study of the revolution from below has become a major cottage industry. Indeed, just as most of the 1619 Project’s content was not new to those familiar with recent writing about slavery and race, the idea that ordinary Americans did much to shape the revolution is now commonplace. What is new in Holton’s latest book, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, is his effort to unite “the known and unknown revolutions” in a single narrative. Like Becker, to whom he tips his hat by titling one chapter “Who Should Rule at Home?,” Holton depicts the revolution as simultaneously a struggle for independence and a series of overlapping conflicts between and within groups of Americans. The result is a book with a remarkably capacious cast of characters. Jefferson, Washington, and other iconic founders are here, but so too are the many “obscure Americans” who were also consequential historical actors. By foregrounding their experience, Holton arrives at a complex, bittersweet calculus of how independence was achieved and who gained or lost as a result.

In the years leading up to the War of Independence, Holton writes, “vicious” internal conflicts plagued the American colonies. In the Hudson Valley, tenant farmers resisted the exorbitant rents demanded by landlords. Mobs in backwoods North Carolina calling themselves “Regulators” refused to pay taxes levied by the far-away provincial legislature. Slaves openly demanded freedom. Native Americans resisted white settlers encroaching on their land, leading to persistent violence on the frontier. Holton notes that far from uniting Americans, the war exacerbated these and other cleavages. Communities fractured into loyalists and patriots. More and more lower-class Americans challenged existing elites. (“The gentry begin to fear this,” remarked Gouverneur Morris.) Native American nations chose sides, so that Native warriors sometimes faced one another in combat. And, Holton writes, the war became, in part, “an African American civil war,” as slaves aligned with whichever combatant seemed to advance their own prospects for freedom. Once France and Spain entered the conflict on the side of the colonists, the War of Independence was also absorbed into the long-standing struggle for global power among European empires. As Holton points out, George Washington sent troops into battle not only against the British Army but also against Native Americans, Hessians, and Black soldiers. This is not your grandfather’s American Revolution, a simple tale of liberty-loving patriots rising up against British tyranny.

Women also play a larger role in Holton’s account than in most histories of the era. The struggle, he writes, inspired many to add their voices to the public debate for the first time. “I must be a little of a politician,” wrote the poet Hannah Griffitts. Abigail Adams, the subject of one of Holton’s previous books, is widely remembered today for her letter urging her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” when new state governments were formed. Women, she playfully observed, would “not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice.” Not playful was Adams’s later decision to write her own will, a direct challenge to the common law of coverture, according to which a married woman’s property belonged to her husband. Adams left everything to her female relatives and servants. Women, she believed, needed independence from male authority as much as men did from British rule, and without their own economic resources, they would never enjoy it.

A few women took a more direct role in the conflict, disguising themselves as men and enlisting in the Continental Army. Some, living in occupied territory, passed military information along to patriot forces. Holton echoes the 19th-century writer Elizabeth Ellet’s speculation that “contempt for female influence and intelligence” led British officers to commit the serious mistake of discussing their plans openly in the presence of American women.

Partly because it has been caught up in recent debates, Liberty Is Sweet has attracted an unusual amount of public attention for a volume that runs to over 700 pages and includes a 60-page bibliography and more than 100 pages of endnotes. Not long ago, Holton and Gordon Wood, a major scholar of the revolutionary era and one of the 1619 Project’s vocal critics, engaged in a livestreamed debate at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Wood used the occasion to castigate the last generation or two of scholars for, in his view, hostility not only to prominent founders but to the revolution itself. Holton identified Wood with what he has called the consensus account of the revolution, which he claims privileges American elites. Surprisingly, given their substantial differences, Wood provided a prepublication endorsement for Liberty Is Sweet. It appears on the back cover and calls the book “a spirited account of the Revolution that brings everybody and everything into the story.” Since it is an axiom of historical scholarship that constructing a narrative of past events requires careful selection from an endless array of available facts—as a professor of mine once said, “What makes a book good is what you leave out”—this must qualify as one of the least complimentary blurbs on record.

As one reads Liberty Is Sweet, one gets a sense of why Wood might have struggled to compose a more enthusiastic accolade. Holton’s take on the most prominent founders—seen by Wood and many other historians as exemplars of self-sacrificing devotion to the common good—is less than celebratory. In Holton’s account, they were land speculators, smugglers, and slave owners for whom self-interest often took precedence over principle. One reason for the colonists’ opposition to the Quebec Act of 1774, he tells us, was that it extended the boundaries of that province, recently acquired from France, to include the land between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, a blow to colonial land speculators with claims there. In the same year, when the Continental Congress suspended trade with Great Britain to protest the punitive Coercive Acts, Virginia obstinately demanded and received the right to sell tobacco to the mother country for another year, while South Carolina secured permission to continue to export rice. During the conflict, leading merchants were denounced by ordinary folk as “Engrossers” and “Monopolizers” for holding scarce goods off the market to drive up prices.

Readers familiar with Holton’s earlier books may be surprised by how much of Liberty Is Sweet consists of detailed accounts of troop movements and military engagements, large and small. By the end, they may feel that they have personally walked the battlefields, waded through swamps, and traversed forest paths with Holton as their guide. He reminds us that despite Britain’s military strength, the geography of eastern North America, with its dense woods and numerous stone walls, gave American forces a considerable advantage. They knew the terrain far better than their opponents and found it easy to find defensive positions from which to fire on advancing enemy units.

Holton takes a dim view of the military commanders on both sides. British generals shuffled troops from one colony to another to little apparent purpose. Holton credits George Washington with economic shrewdness, calling him “the gold standard against which lesser [land] speculators were judged.” But when it came to the war itself, he chastises Washington for an obsession with heroically driving the British from New York or Philadelphia, an idea that, fortunately, he never acted on. Indeed, Holton writes, Washington’s “single greatest contribution” to American victory was changing his mind and abandoning the notion of storming British lines. ...Read More