What is 1776 in 2026? A Library (and University) Approach

IF 1776 seems like a legible year for the American Revolution, in many ways it was also just another year. In Providence, Rhode Island, Nicholas Brown and his brothers in business were attending to the lottery the new United States had launched to help finance its war against Great Britain, but also keeping accounts of the goods they were buying and selling around the Atlantic as well as right around the corner. In Lima, a Peruvian printer on San Jacinto Street typeset a small pamphlet, a novena to mourn and glorify Jesus. In the Sonora region of Mexico, Pedro Font's first map of the San Francisco Bay was being prepared for publication. Men and women across the Americas were working, feeding their families, preparing for the turning seasons, and alerted to the threats of violence that came from the American conflict—or elsewhere. In positions of enslavement or freedom, of deprivation or relative comfort, they were differently attuned to, interested in, and affected by this emerging crisis and the nation that was born of it.1As we accelerate into our programs for 2026, part of the John Carter Brown Library's programming for the semiquincentennial is attending to the prosaic and dramatic hemispheric contexts of that year. As a library of the early Americas, we are ever attentive to the full North and South American dimensions of the period, and to how those contexts could be both distinctive but entwined and resonant. The American Revolution was profound and consequential, and at the time, declaring independence was a recognizably radical act. But it was also a result of a longish back and forth between Britain and its mainland North American colonies, in which the full continent, Caribbean, and South American contexts tangled. From Philadelphia to Cap Français, then Cap-Haïtien, from Boston to Quebec, from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro to the Rio de la Plata, and northwest to San Francisco, questions about what 1776 meant or simply what was paramount in that year will punctuate our work.And a key commitment of our 2026 energy is doing work that is distinctive to the library. Every institution and organization will want both to recognize this anniversary and make a contribution to the commemoration that reflects their mission and priorities, but that also is not the same repeated material and themes. Much as reiteration is important in all history work, public-facing and specialist alike, it is vital to share core themes from this period. Yet we also recognize that we have particular perspectives, and for the JCB, our first and primary thematic emphasis is the hemispheric approach. So while we are, for example, highlighting in “1776 Across the Americas” some expected printed and manuscript materials from the British American perspective, including one of our copies of the Declaration of Independence and a newly acquired journal of a Continental Army soldier, we'll also be displaying the Pedro Font map of San Francisco and many more items from a broad hemispheric range.A second theme reflects our location in Rhode Island: the history of religious liberty. The complex relationship of emerging democratic government and the ideals of religious freedom is often a point of pride for Rhode Island, with Roger Williams's commitment both to religious freedom and to the separation of church and state at the center of the colony's founding. Too, the famous exchange between Newport's Truro Synagogue and George Washington in 1790 marked not only a key articulation of these principles for the United States, but a firm recognition of the place of Judaism in American life. In America, President Washington wrote, “the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Even so, on the title page of his copy of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Nicholas Brown (grandfather to John Carter Brown) wrote that this core expression of the principles of American independence was written by “a scoffer of religion.”2 He didn't mean this kindly. A firm Baptist, Brown, like many of his and subsequent generations of Americans, may have been theoretically committed to religious freedom, but they, like others, could have a hard time putting this into practice—especially for individuals and groups whose beliefs they found personally objectionable. Long a subject of research across the Americas, as Indigenous, European, and African people encountered and clashed with one another, the state of belief, both religious and political, and the conditions of freedom, or simply tolerance unencumbered, make this a vital theme for the semiquincentennial.The third theme we are taking up is the role of our library, and institutions like ours, in creating knowledge. We know that we do more than passively hold collections; like other libraries and archives, we continue to acquire materials to enhance our collections, interpret our materials through cataloging and curatorial work, including exhibits, and make materials variably accessible, often through digitization projects (though we also now have a plan and a workflow to digitize the full library). We co-sponsored a conference with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies on “Archives of Revolution,” for example, and have been holding a reading group on Critical Archives for the last year.In each of these three themes for the full “2026 and Beyond” initiative the JCB is sponsoring research, including a year-long exhibit “1776 Across the Americans,” developing programs including a joint conference with the Danforth Center for Religion and Politics at Washington University in June 2026 on Religion and Freedom in Emerging Democracies, and investing in access to our digital collections by expanding and deepening cataloging and imaging of relevant materials. We plan to build on these three themes, what we're calling “Foundations of Revolution” (the hemispheric context), “Foundations of Democracy” (freedom of religion), and “Foundations of Knowledge” (how libraries make history), following the semiquincentennial (thus “2026 and Beyond”). To help support our work in the semiquincentennial year and after, we created a two-year postdoctoral fellowship: recent William Brown 2026 is focused on the role of research and teaching universities in and for democracy, as well as the histories and legacies of the American Revolution. In this latter emphasis, the JCB has partnered with Brown 2026 on a variety of programs, welcoming scholars and public figures to the library for events and sharing materials from our collections–particularly those that enhance our own three themes. Through Brown 2026, multiple fellows working on related research are appointed annually for 2024–25, 2025–26, and then 2026–27, and these cohorts dovetail well with the JCB's regular and 2026 fellows’ work. In addition, the JCB's work with Brown 2026 connects us to state and local commemorative work, especially with RI250 and our now regular partner in history education work, the Rhode Island Historical Society.Reviewing this abstract and summary of what the John Carter Brown Library has committed to do to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States, I'm struck by how little we would change had we known that these efforts would be taking place in such a newly challenging environment. I am not referring here to the fraught political context, but to the dismantling of many of the structures within which we assumed we would be working. The National Endowment for the Humanities, for example, has long been a staple of historical work related to the period of the American Revolution. During the Bicentennial, the JCB already held an NEH award for long-term fellowships, but then-Director and Librarian Thomas Adams had also been working since the late 1960s on his project that would be awarded an NEH grant for individual scholarship and would culminate in publication of The American Controversy: A Bibliographical Study of the British Pamphlets about the American Disputes, 1764–1783 (Brown University Press, 1980). While the NEH is currently being directed by the White House to fund projects that fulfill particular interests and emphases, and possibly Adams's would have fallen within this remit, the wide scope of the JCB's research mission likely would not. Indeed, the fellowship program through which the JCB and many other independent research institutions have funded excellent research for many decades was eradicated. More so, the kinds of projects that state humanities councils, including our own Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, would have supported for the semiquincentennial are now deflated due to the same cuts to NEH funding and programs. The Bicentennial produced a robust legacy through scholarship that developed and made accessible an extraordinary range of sources via expert editing and curation, as well as innovative narrative and analytical history. How, collectively, will we hope to make a substantial payment forward to the next commemorative era, given the weakened funding and troubling political environment for expert historical work? Yet our focus on doing work that is distinctive to our capacities and expertise and helps contribute to the broader whole of the semiquincentennial remains unchanged.Two possibilities further animate our 2026 work at the JCB and will carry us forward. The first is the collaborative ethos in which we're operating. Across institutions, I hope we're all experiencing the importance of mutual support but also the clear rewards of working together. The last decades have produced so much vigorous research, applied in both academic and public history contexts, for understanding the fuller story of a vastly expanded American Revolution. The best way to realize its promise, in service of the civic good, is to work together.And the second is the obvious energetic interest in that fuller history. Visitors—researchers and students, and the general public alike—come to us, as they visit our colleagues across the variety of organizations in the history business, to learn. Sharing a driving curiosity about the past and a firm sense of its importance means our audiences, from the most expert to the most enthusiastically new, are eager. We mean to be responsive to that eagerness for learning and sharing about this foundational period—across the Americas.