The Long Revolution
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
About the Project
This website is a companion to The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. It provides an interactive database of nearly 2,500 Fourth of July orations delivered between 1777 and 1876.
For a hundred years after independence, Americans gathered every Fourth of July to hear public speeches that celebrated, contested, and reimagined the meaning of the new republic. These orations were far more than ceremony: they were a primary vehicle through which citizens debated what the United States was and what it should become.
The database allows you to search, map, and visualize the full corpus of known orations from this period, exploring who spoke, where they spoke, and how the tradition evolved over the century.
This is a living archive that continues to grow as new orations are discovered and added. In subsequent updates, we will expand the database with additional orations, explore new visualizations, such as network analysis, and continue to explore the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of this important public discourse.