America @250: The whole world played a role
New book links India into 1776. Updike's classic novel anticipated Trump and MAGA
This Week, Those Books links the big international story to the world of books and has a few thousand followers on every continent except Antarctica. We aim to provide, in roughly five minutes, crucial context – from fiction and non-fiction – to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
The Big Story:
America’s 250th birthday – its semiquincentennial, in Latin – is both joyous and fraught.
Many around the world still thrill to the revolutionary ideals enshrined in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which has inspired generations.
But some Americans are in a pessimistic mood, according to a poll by Pew Research Centre.1
More context, fewer walls
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This Week’s Books:
A historian links the rest of the world into 1776.
John Updike’s magnificent novel captures America’s angst.
Three years of finding books for every American birthday mean three posts, free to read:
Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution
By: Sarah M S Pearsall
Publisher: Doubleday
Year: 2026
American accounts of history generally linger on their exceptionalism. But Johns Hopkins professor Sarah M S Pearsall’s book, published in May, is unusual. It shows that the American revolution overlaps with other anti-imperial resistance movements across the world. From St Kitts in the Caribbean to Cuba, Scotland to Sierra Leone, Gibraltar to Germany, the book sets out to “connect this US story with a bigger world and see the interconnections as dynamic and significant”.
Those interconnections revolve around the concept of freedom in a world overrun by European colonialists. Pearsall notes that around the time Britain’s 13 North American colonies were getting restive, many people in disparate places were also invoking (or had already raised) the idea of freedom, or opposition to slavery. She writes: “In 1753, the nawab (ruler) of Bengal lamented that the British plundered the country and forced a ‘great number…of both sexes into slavery’. In 1754, Antiguans in the Caribbean condemned the impressment of men as sailors on warships as ‘inconsistent with Civil Liberty, and the Natural Rights of Mankind’.”
Considering 1776 was all about the revolt of those 13 North American colonies, it’s significant that Pearsall pays tribute to the role played by acts of resistance in other parts of the British empire. They “drew away British resources” from the American fight for liberty, she says, in reference to “anticolonial fights such as the First and Second Anglo-Mysore wars”. In 1780, the ruler of Mysore, Haidar Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan “trounced the British in Pollilur, thanks to 26,000 cavalry and 6,000 infantry soldiers”. Significantly, those battlefield numbers were larger than the American forces who ended the revolution in 1781 by decisively defeating the British at Yorktown. Clearly, Mysore served as a distraction to British colonialists!
Interesting parallels emerge from Pearsall’s book. For instance, the American revolution’s version of swadeshi, the Hindi word for Mahatma Gandhi’s self-sufficiency movement against the British empire. In response to the Stamp Act of 1765 and punitive British taxation, Americans stopped buying British textiles as a patriotic act. Instead, they wore homespun, surely a precursor to Gandhi’s khadi movement.
Choice quotes:
…a refusal to be treated “like a slave”—a type of person familiar to most by then—seemed across many distinct locations to be an effective way to make a case for better treatment. The American Revolution did not provoke this shift. Rather, these demands for liberty emerged out of a wider world, sparking changes too often attributed to the political revolution in thirteen North American colonies. Of course, global claims of freedom were not new either; they had roots in classical and biblical worlds. However, they took on novel resonance in a period of accelerating rates of especially Atlantic slavery…
Was the United States exceptional? Yes, but not necessarily in the ways people usually assume. North Americans in the thirteen colonies were not the first or only people in this era to lament their slavery or even to launch a full-scale rebellion. Plenty of other people—from rebels in Tacky’s War in Jamaica in 1760 to those in the Dutch colony of Surinam in 1763 to those in St. Vincents in the early 1770s—had done so.[25] The St. Vincents insurrection resulted in the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty over part of that Caribbean island.
Rabbit Redux
By: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Year: 1971
Considering America’s 250th birthday is supervised by President Donald Trump, it’s worth examining this novel by one of the country’s greatest 20th-century writers. This John Updike novel is a forerunner of MAGA nostalgia for a golden past set in the 1950s. It’s the second book in Updike’s quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Set in the late 1960s, we see a restless Harry. He has moved on from his schooldays as a basketball star of his small Pennsylvanian town of Brewer. Now, he is now a Linotype operator in a local factory. He has a teenage son, a cooling marriage and feels an increasing sense of irritation at the racial and cultural changes underway. He feels that the America he knew is slipping away. Harry is a nice chap in all sorts of ways, but it really does feel like he shares a lot with Trump’s angry, working-class base.
Choice quote:
It’s as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.
The Back Story:
Thomas Jefferson, principal author of America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, wrote the powerful preamble declaring that “all men are created equal”.
The Declaration of Independence inaugurated an “experiment” in self-government that continues to this day.
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On the Country’s 250th Anniversary, the American People Are in a Sour Mood. Pew Research Centre, June 12, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/2026/06/12/on-the-countrys-250th-anniversary-the-american-people-are-in-a-sour-mood/
Three in five Americans believe the country’s best days are behind it, while seven in 10 are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working in their country.