Four days before the nation's semiquincentennial, the New York Times Magazine published a sprawling interactive project on the American Revolution, and managed to leave out George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. In their place, readers got an unsigned introduction declaring that "land, not taxes, was the first grievance that sparked conflict between Britain and its colonies," and profiles of seven lesser-known figures most Americans have never heard of.
The project, which went live on June 22, frames the founding not as a contest over self-governance and natural rights but as a story of colonial land hunger aimed at Native territories. As the Washington Free Beacon noted in a detailed critique, the Times chose to mark the nation's 250th anniversary by recasting the Revolution's causes around anti-Native sentiment and westward expansion, a framing that conveniently aligns with the progressive left's preferred narrative about America's origins.
That framing matters. It is one thing to expand the cast of the founding era. It is another to rewrite the plot.
The unsigned introduction to the interactive piece starts the clock at 1763, the year King George III issued his Proclamation limiting westward settlement. The project states:
"The story starts in 1763... King George III sought to limit westward expansion into Native territories to avoid expensive new frontier wars and protect the fur trade, while colonial farmers felt entitled to the soil that had just been won. Land, not taxes, was the first grievance that sparked conflict between Britain and its colonies."
That single paragraph does a remarkable amount of editorial work. It repositions the entire Revolution, a conflict over parliamentary sovereignty, taxation without representation, and natural rights, as a dispute between greedy settlers and a reasonable king trying to protect Native peoples. The Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Declaratory Acts, the Intolerable Acts, and the philosophical inheritance of English liberty all get subordinated to a real-estate quarrel.
The project then profiles seven founders: Good Peter, Herman Husband, Mercy Otis Warren, John Leland, Lemuel Haynes, Joseph Plumb Martin, and Elizabeth Freeman. Some of these figures are genuinely interesting. But Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Hancock, Richard Henry Lee, Arthur Lee, and Charles Carroll, men who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, are absent from the featured lineup.
Jane Kamensky, who left Harvard's history faculty to become president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, wrote the project's introductory essay. She acknowledges the risk of two bad approaches to the founding. One, she writes, would produce "a graveyard of mustachioed villains: toppled statues of figures so often excoriated by today's progressives, who insist that the moral depravity of the founding fathers was so profound that they can teach us nothing, indeed that the founding itself was irredeemably corrupt, as the nation remains." The other would offer "a garden of unblemished alabaster heroes, a sanitized portrait."
Kamensky also concedes that "all pluribus and no unum does not a national narrative make, any more than a war can be won without generals."
That is a striking admission. If a war cannot be won without generals, why build a 250th-anniversary project that excludes every general? Kamensky names the problem and then lets the project commit it anyway. The result is a project that leans heavily toward the "graveyard of mustachioed villains" approach she claims to reject, just with the villains politely offstage rather than toppled in the town square.
The pattern is familiar. The New York Times has traveled this road before. Its Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project argued, in essence, that Americans should be marking the nation's 407th anniversary rather than its 250th, centering the founding story on the arrival of enslaved Africans rather than the Declaration of Independence. That project drew corrections and sustained criticism from professional historians. Now the Times has produced what looks like a companion piece, same institution, same revisionist instinct, different grievance category.
It is worth asking whether the paper's editorial leadership sees a pattern, or whether each project simply feels like fresh intellectual courage from the inside. The Times has faced its own credibility questions in recent months, including allegations that it softened coverage to benefit a Democratic campaign. A 250th-anniversary project that sidelines the actual founders does not help the paper's reputation for straight dealing.
The "land, not taxes" thesis has a surface plausibility, some colonists did covet western lands, and some founders already owned vast tracts of thousands of acres. But reducing the Revolution to a land grab requires ignoring an enormous body of evidence about what the colonists themselves said they were fighting for.
The Declaration of Independence speaks of governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." That is a philosophical claim about political legitimacy, not a surveyor's dispute. The Declaratory Acts, which the Free Beacon's Ira Stoll notes were "not taxes but merely statements that Parliament has the right to impose taxes", provoked colonial fury precisely because they asserted unlimited parliamentary sovereignty over people who had no vote in Parliament.
The ideological origins of the Revolution, documented extensively by historian Bernard Bailyn, trace back well before 1763. Stoll points to the Puritans who left England between 1625 and 1649, and to Cotton Mather's 1689 rebellion in Boston against Sir Edmund Andros, the royal governor of the Dominion of New England. The colonists' insistence on self-governance had roots more than a century deep by the time shots were fired at Lexington.
The project's treatment of Native Americans and the founding generation is also more complicated than the "anti-Native sentiment" frame allows. Samuel Adams, one of the founders the Times project does not profile, appealed directly to Mohawk Indians in 1775 to join the revolutionary cause:
"We therefore earnestly desire you to whet your hatchet and be prepared with us to defend our liberties and lives."
That is not the language of a man whose primary motivation was seizing Native land. Fifteen years later, Adams wrote to John Adams with a view of Native peoples that was paternalistic by modern standards but hardly genocidal: "Even Savages might, by the means of Education, be instructed to frame the best civil, and political Institutions with as much skill and ingenuity, as they now shape their Arrows."
None of this means the founding era was free of brutality toward Native peoples. It was not. But flattening a complex, multi-causal revolution into a single-grievance narrative about land is not serious history. It is political storytelling.
The timing of the project is difficult to separate from the current political climate. Clare Valdez, a socialist who recently won the Democratic primary for a New York City congressional seat with Mayor Zohran Mamdani's endorsement, captured the mood of a certain wing of the left when she declared: "Look, this nation was founded on genocide, on the mass displacement of people. This is, it's just the history."
When a major congressional candidate and a flagship newspaper share the same thesis about the founding, that America's origin story is fundamentally one of dispossession and violence, it stops looking like independent scholarship and starts looking like a shared political project. The Times project, Stoll observed, "intersects, suspiciously conveniently, with the political mood at the moment on the extreme left."
That mood has been building across progressive media for years. Whether it is broadcast outlets accused of functioning as party operations or print institutions rewriting the national story to suit contemporary ideological preferences, the pattern is consistent: major media institutions increasingly treat the American founding as something to apologize for rather than build on.
Perhaps the most telling detail is what happened in the Times's own comments section. One reader comment, upvoted by more than 100 others, cut directly against the project's framing:
"The modern progressive discourse is completely dominated by the themes of slavery, racism and indigenous genocide. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the experiences of the vast majority of the people who actually lived in the past and settled this country, leaving a hollow and one-sided conception of history... If you think America was bad, you really don't know enough about the rest of the world during the 18th and 19th centuries."
That is not a quote from a conservative commentator or a Republican press release. It is a New York Times subscriber, speaking in the paper's own forum, telling the paper it got the story wrong. When your own paying readers revolt against your framing, the problem is not with the audience.
Kamensky herself engaged in the comments, advising readers to "find their patriotism" and writing that "patriotism, as I wrote in this article, means belonging to the nation. Finding each of ours is essential. None is not an answer." The sentiment is unobjectionable in the abstract. But it rings hollow when the project she introduces systematically excludes the men and ideas that gave the nation its constitutional structure.
The broader media environment only amplifies the concern. When legacy outlets face questions about their own reporters' conduct and internal credibility problems, choosing the nation's 250th birthday to relitigate whether the founding was legitimate is a peculiar editorial priority.
The Times hired a British illustrator, Tim McDonagh, whose previous work includes a BBC celebration of women wheelchair athletes, a tour backdrop for an Australian comedian featuring "zebras, pink flamingos, dinosaurs, and a 'pig's willy,'" and an anti-drunk-driving campaign for the British government. His style, per his own website, is "inspired by old comics, gig posters and tattoos." That is the aesthetic sensibility the paper chose to depict the American founding for the nation's 250th anniversary.
Every editorial project involves choices, what to include, what to exclude, what to emphasize, what to minimize. The New York Times Magazine chose to start the Revolution's story in 1763 rather than in the century of self-governing tradition that preceded it. It chose to frame land as the "first grievance" rather than parliamentary overreach. It chose seven obscure founders over the men who wrote the Declaration, led the Continental Army, and designed the Constitution. It chose a British comic-poster illustrator over an American artist.
Each choice, taken alone, might be defensible as a creative decision. Taken together, they form a pattern, one that treats the American founding as a problem to be deconstructed rather than an achievement to be understood, critiqued, and built upon.
The nation turns 250 years old. The New York Times marked the occasion by telling its readers that the whole thing started because colonists wanted someone else's dirt. The paper's own subscribers did not buy it. That may be the most encouraging fact in the entire story.
