...I walked into the packed lecture hall, standing in the back with my laptop open ready to take notes. During the first half of the lecture, Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discussed the answers she received from the first session of this class (which I did not attend), when she had asked those in the room to jot down a list of things that come to mind when she said the words "American Revolution."

Not surprisingly, the discussion centered on the names of the major founding fathers. But this, we were told by Professor Ulrich, was "Founding father chic." In other words: we possessed only an immature understanding of American Revolutionary history, clouded by the glorification of its main political players. A short discussion of the founding documents ensued, during which Professor Ulrich quoted the historian Pauline Maier on the issue of the founding documents having achieved a quasi-sacred status in the civic religion of American politics, in a way comparable to the way other religions revere their own holy texts.

Professor Ulrich then announced, with some disappointment, that only 3 students-out of a response pool of approximately 180-wrote down the word slavery. This comment began the second half of her lecture, which might well have been titled, "A Short Break From American History to Glorify, Not the Founding Fathers, But Barack Obama." Professor Ulrich, after mentioning the (real and disturbing) relationship between the founding fathers and slavery, proceeded to play, on two massive projector screens, the first few minutes of Barack Obama's famed speech on race in Philadelphia this past March...