It was telling that the last pop culture sensation to tackle the American Revolution—the 2015 musical Hamilton—felt that the best way to make the nation’s founding legible to modern audiences was to cast a Founding Father as a plucky immigrant. So distant was…
But these conservative orations were countered by the speeches of abolitionists, feminists, and labor organizers. Nearly all, Perl-Rosenthal finds, portrayed their fights for economic, racial, and ge…