This illustrated lecture sets the 250th commemoration of the American Revolution in both a historical and contemporary context. What did the Declaration of Independence mean in 1776? Equally important, what should it mean to us today?
Liam Riordan is Department Chair and Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine where he has been on the faculty since 1997. He is the co-editor of What We Know, What We Wish: Maine Statehood, Historical Commemoration, and the Urgency of Public History (UMass Press, 2025). He is a specialist on the American Revolution and has a book project about loyalists, those who opposed the rebellion that created the United States. In 2020 he received the Maine Historical Society’s Neal W. Allen History Award for outstanding contributions to Maine history.
