Author Talk: Robert G. Parkinson —Tyrants and Rogues - with Lindsay M. Chervinsky

Author Robert G. Parkinson discusses their book "Tyrants and Rogues" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

From an acclaimed historian, a revelatory account of the Declaration of Independence, centered not on the lofty preamble but on the specific grievances that make up the bulk of the document and that offer an entirely new view into the Revolutionary era.

We think of the Declaration of Independence as timeless. We know the sacred phrases: “all men are created equal,” “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “self-evident truths,” “certain inalienable rights.” These are some of the most important words human beings have ever written. And they are all from the Declaration’s preamble, which has inspired people for centuries, including generations of revolutionaries all over the world.

But as historian Robert G. Parkinson points out, the Declaration was not written as a timeless statement of political philosophy. It was, rather, produced in the heat of a confusing, bloody, and desperate war. And in that moment, it wasn’t high ideals alone that drove the patriots forward. Parkinson’s great innovation is to allow us, 250 years on, to see the Declaration as its authors did. For them, the opening paragraphs were not the main event. It was the body of the Declaration—the twenty-seven grievances against King George—that formed the essential part. Even Thomas Jefferson would have been puzzled by history’s fixation on his opening sentences.

Parkinson takes us into the grievances, giving us stories of the Revolutionary era that are little known today but loomed large for the patriots. As the leaders of the Revolution saw it, they had been pushed to the breaking point by British officials who undermined colonial legislatures and courts, corrupted the judiciary, turned military power against civilians, inflamed slave revolts, forced colonists to fight one another—ultimately, waging war on their own people.

In his brilliantly original reading of the Declaration, Parkinson asks fundamental questions that have too often been overlooked: Why did the colonies declare independence when they did? What were their nonnegotiable demands? Who were the individuals whose actions made reconciliation impossible? By recovering the people and conflicts behind the Declaration’s grievances, Parkinson offers a strikingly new account of the American Revolution—and shows that the issues that most alarmed colonists in 1776 are urgent once again today.

Robert G. Parkinson is professor of history at Binghamton University. He is the author of The Common Cause, Thirteen Clocks, and Heart of American Darkness. He lives in Charles Town, West Virginia.

Parkinson is joined in conversation with Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a presidential historian and Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Dr. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning books Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic and The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, and co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture. Dr. Chervinsky regularly writes for public audiences in publications like the Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and provides commentary and historical context for outlets like CBS News, C-SPAN, Face the Nation, the New York Times, and NPR.

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