Global Webinar
June 25, 2026
2-4 PM (EDT)
A Discussion with Historians
Sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site
Two hundred and fifty years after the Continental Congress proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, American democracy confronts its gravest crisis since the Civil War. The democratic principles proclaimed in Philadelphia in July 1776—that all men are created equal, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that the people retain the right to abolish any government that becomes destructive of these ends—are being trampled by a government controlled by a financial-corporate oligarchy. At the same time, political and social resistance to the assault on democracy is being undermined by the claim that there is nothing in the historical legacy of the American Revolution worth defending.
While rejecting simplistic nationalist myth-making, the standpoint of this webinar is that the American Revolution was a world-historic event. Despite its historically determined limitations, contradictions, and compromises, the American Revolution set into motion a global wave of democratic revolutions. It led inexorably to the destruction of slavery in the United States and the emergence of a new epoch of struggle for the emancipation of the working class.
The webinar will feature a distinguished panel of historians who have written extensively on the complex legacy of the American Revolution: James Oakes, Richard Carwardine, Sean Wilentz, Adam Hochschild, and Thomas Mackaman. The webinar will be moderated by David North, International Editor of the World Socialist Web Site.
James Oakes is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and a leading historian of slavery, antislavery politics, and the Civil War era. He is a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, awarded for The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics and Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865.
Richard Carwardine is former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and two-time Lincoln Prize-winning biographer of Abraham Lincoln. He is the author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power and Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union.
Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, a Bancroft Prize–winning historian, and a leading interpreter of pre-Civil War democracy, party politics, and social conflict. He is the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.
Adam Hochschild is a bestselling historian and journalist whose work spans imperialism, war, slavery, and the long struggle for human rights. His books include American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a National Book Award finalist; and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
Thomas Mackaman is John H.A. Whitman Distinguished Service Professor of History at King's College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and writes for the World Socialist Web Site on US and labor history. He is the author of New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor, 1914–1924 and co-editor with David North of The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History.
David North is the national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party and chairman of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board. Active in the leadership of the Fourth International for 50 years, he is the author of numerous works on history and politics, including The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century. He is the editor of the newly published Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy.
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Today marks the 244th anniversary of the public proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776, which established the United States of America. It is not only the direct political impact of the document, but, rather, the principles it proclaimed that determined its world historical stature.
The World Socialist Web Site marked the 244th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by hosting a discussion with five significant historians: Victoria Bynum, Clayborne Carson, Richard Carwardine, James Oakes and Gordon Wood.
In a career spanning six decades and numerous books, articles and lectures, Wood established himself as the foremost historian of the American Revolution and the Early Republic.
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with leading Lincoln biographer Richard Carwardine about the Times’ 1619 Project
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