John Adams

American culture loves to romanticize the founding fathers and the timeline of its revolutionary history. The US puts the faces of their founders on its currency, names thousands of their cities, parks and universities after them, and showcases their quotes all over government buildings throughout all 50 states. Names like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton are seared into all aspects of the country’s revolutionary story. There is one key founder, though, that always tends to slip under the radar in the never-ending celebration, and that founder is John Adams.

We are going to explore aspects of John Adams’ life and Presidency to uncover why our nation does not boast of his legacy to the same levels of his contemporaries. Why does our retelling of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence shine a light on Jefferson and Ben Franklin when it was Adams’ idea? How did Adams go from being a national hero after the Revolutionary War to becoming our nation’s first one-term President? Given Adams’ accomplishments, it is baffling that he is often downplayed and excluded from the pop culture narrative of the nation’s founding, and tackling his Presidency can tell us a lot about why that is.

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Presidents