This special event with Professor Jason Frank (Cornell University) is part of “1776/2026: The Declaration at 250”, a year-long series of campus events and public conversations.
John Quincy Adams once wrote that democracy “has no monuments,” and that its “very essence is iconoclastic.” Yet monumental commemoration has been a continued site of political conflict in American democracy, a site where the boundaries of peoplehood are contested and reconfigured. This “1776/2026” talk will explore the dynamic connections between democracy, commemoration, and peoplehood, asking on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: What does it mean to commemorate a democratic revolution?
Jason Frank is the John L. Senior Professor of Government at Cornell University, and currently a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has published widely on democratic theory, American political thought, politics and literature, and the history of popular sovereignty. His books include Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America, Publius and Political Imagination, and The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly.
“1776/2026: The Declaration at 250”: This year-long series of campus events and public conversations offers historical, literary, rhetorical, and political-theoretical interpretations of what this document means a quarter millennium after its signing. Recent 1776/2026 events included a conversation with Colleen Shogan, former Archivist of the United States, on pluralistic democracy in a partisan age, and the Freedom Seekers Symposium, which shared stories of Black liberation in the American Revolutionary era and beyond. 1776/2026 is a program of the Paul Martin Wolff Center, with additional support from the College of Letters & Science and the Center for the Humanities.