A Century of Orations: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal Listens to 2,500 Voices of the American Revolution

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. It's not long now. America is almost 250 years old. It's only a couple of weeks until the nation celebrates with barbecues and parades and all sorts of things. One thing that perhaps people won't be doing is making speeches about what it means to be 250 years old and what the American Revolution means to them and to their communities. My guest today, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, has a new book out. It's called The Long Revolution, Creating a United States After 1776, which looks at America in terms of these July 4th orations to make sense of both American history and the revolution in American life. Nathan is joining us from Cambridge. Is that fair, Nathan? Am I summarizing your book correctly? The Long Revolution, Creating a United States After 1776

**Nathan Perl-Rosenthal** (1:33)
Impeccable.

**Andrew Keen** (1:35)
Oh, that was a quick interview.

**Nathan Perl-Rosenthal** (1:41)
I can tell you you're wrong and tell you other things, but that was great.

**Andrew Keen** (1:45)
So this idea of looking back, you're a historian.
You're currently at the University of Southern California. You're involved with Harvard University. What did, looking back at all these orations, Nathan, teach us or teach you as a historian about the revolutionary tradition in America?

**Nathan Perl-Rosenthal** (2:04)
Yeah. So maybe I should just say a little bit about how many of these orations there are and a little bit about where they are.
That'd be all right.

**Andrew Keen** (2:13)
That'd be good. It's your show. You do whatever you like. You can even give an oration. Maybe at the end, we'll ask you for a July 4th oration.

**Nathan Perl-Rosenthal** (2:21)
Well, we're not going to have time because the orations would go on in the time that I'm looking at. They go on for an hour or more.

**Andrew Keen** (2:27)
Well, this is the Internet. It's infinite, Nathan. We can do it for hours. We can do it for days even.

**Nathan Perl-Rosenthal** (2:31)
All right. You're on. You're on.
So there are probably something like 100,000 of these orations delivered during the first century after independence. That's a rough estimate based on contemporary estimates. You have to imagine that there are probably a thousand towns and villages, cities which are having orations every year, 100 years. And of those, we have lots of evidence of bits and pieces of them in newspapers, things like that. But there are 2,500 of them, 2,500, which are published during this first century as pamphlets. We have the whole text. And the website you're seeing intermittently there, Fourth of July Orations, is basically a digital database that lists all of those and tells you where they happen. And you can even see different locations, you can look at it year by year. So these 2,500 published orations are a kind of distinctive window into American life. They tell us about really what a kind of public-facing group of people are thinking about the United States in this period, what they think America is about, and what they think the revolution is about. And the crucial, I would say, the first thing to say about them is in the title of the book.
The orators, most orators deep into the 19th century, think that the revolution is still ongoing. Not 5 years after the end of the revolution in 1783, not 10 years, not 20, but as late as the Civil War, as late as the 1850s and 60s, and even into reconstruction into the 1870s. There are orators, many orators, who come up and say the revolution is still underway. We are still figuring out what it is. And so they see themselves not as remembering it, but as actors in a long revolution, an ongoing revolution.

**Andrew Keen** (4:31)
The word, the R word, of course, revolution is controversial.
There are historians of America who see it more in reformist terms, and particularly if they're conservative, they think of revolutions in an unhealthy way, associating it with France or the later Russian and Chinese revolutions. What does the word mean to you? Or what did you discover about the word in terms of digging into these archives, these errations? Well, are most people in agreement that on July 4th, we should be talking and celebrating a quote unquote revolution?

**Nathan Perl-Rosenthal** (5:10)
Yeah. Well, it's a great question. One that actually I've worked on in some other contexts as well. So it's a really important and live question, what it means for there to be a revolution, what it means to talk about revolution in the 19th century or since.