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 across the United States 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 ranged from triumphant celebrations of liberty to fierce denunciations of slavery, from calls for national unity to arguments for expansion, reform, and transformation. Together they form one of the richest archives of public political speech in early American history.

The Database

The Orations Database brings this archive to life. It allows you to search, map, and visualize the full corpus of known orations: exploring who spoke, where they spoke, and how the tradition evolved over the century.

The Database was compiled from research in published library catalogs and bibliographies, including those of the New York State Library, the American Antiquarian Society, Harvard University, and Worldcat, among others. Scott Wagner (with Talula Zies) provided invaluable assistance in compiling, formatting, and refining the data.

The Book