On the occasion of “Summer Learning Day” I wrote a related piece, with versions published in Connecticut Viewpoints and the New Haven Register, as well as via Medium.

This blog has included Independence Day posts (e.g., July 2017) from time to time.  This year, I’ve been reading the 1976 book The Minutemen and Their World by Robert A. Gross, in anticipation of learning more from him during a walk around Concord’s Minute Man National Historical Park later this month.

The book concludes with these observations by the author:

“The impact of that revolution in government was profound. It stood as an inspirational model of men’s power to alter their own lives, to think new thoughts, to act on the best ideas of mankind, to liberate themselves from the dead weight of the past…. The Revolution did not so much create the upsurge of confidence in human betterment as certify and encourage it and stimulate those dynamic, progressive forces that had been checked and submerged in colonial society.”  A few decades after the events of 1775 and 1776, “The age of progress had begun.  And it was fitting that the town of Concord, where the Revolution had its start, would eventually produce in Ralph Waldo Emerson nineteenth-century America’s greatest philosopher of that progress and in Henry David Thoreau its greatest critic.”