There’s an excellent piece that’s worth reading over at the Critic magazine regarding what it is like to live through a period of momentous history. In this piece the author, Madsen Pirie, looks at how other stories in Britain played out alongside the one event that many of us know about the year 1776 which was the American Revolution. Mr Pirie talks about the deaths, the discoveries, the executions, the publications, the growing culture of literary and political pamphleteering and the engineering milestones that also occurred in 1776.
This piece, which I’ve linked to below, shows us that whilst there is one major event that we can all point to for the year 1776, this year also saw much of the scientific, literary, political and philosophical groundwork that eventually became the artistic and scientific triumphs that underpinned the Industrial Revolution and massive changes in British society. 1776 is not just the revolution in America it was about the little revolutions and evolutions that happened in Britain.
Mr Pirie’s article is brilliant in its format. It takes 1776 and goes through it month by month detailing both the war in the American colonies and the situation at home and covers the discoveries, scandals, births and more that occurred in that year. This piece by Mr Pirie is well worth a read. 1776 wasn’t just the year that created the United States of America, but was also the year that kicked off the creation of modern Britain.