1776: The Symbol of America’s Enduring Principles

Historian Gordon Wood discusses the country’s founding and championing of the principles of liberty and equality for 250 years.

“Bostonians Reading the Stamp Act,” an illustrated leaf from “Cassell’s History of the United States” by Edmund Ollier, 1874–1877. Public Domain

1776 has become more than the year that marks our country’s birth. It has become the symbol that represents the principles behind America’s founding—the principles of liberty and equality.

This year marks America’s 250th birthday. It has been a quarter of a millennium since the Founders proclaimed that “all men are created equal”—the revolutionary principle upon which the country was built. Of course, this idea of equality was voiced by the Colonists well before the Second Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia to make such sociopolitical claims concrete in the Declaration of Independence.