Books

The Declaration of Independence

Historian Michael D. Hattem offers a fresh history of the Declaration of Independence. He moves beyond how it was written and approved by Congress to offer a narrative of how, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Declaration came to assume its unique status as “American scripture.” Hattem’s story spans a quarter of a millennium and features a cast of countless individuals and groups from around the world who dared to reimagine the Declaration’s ideals in ways the revolutionary generation could never have imagined. The result is a compelling story of the Declaration’s origins and the creation of its legacy over the past two hundred and fifty years.

The Memory of ’76

Finalist, 2025 George Washington Prize

In this sweeping take on American history, Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation’s history. By exploring its unique role in American history as a national origin myth, this book shows how the meaning of the Revolution has never been fixed, how remembering the nation’s founding has often done far more to divide Americans than to unite them, and how revising the past is an important and long‑standing American political tradition.

Past and Prologue

Historian Michael D. Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of the past shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Hattem shows how Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created the foundation of what we think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past, Hattem shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation.