THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended

THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended
THOMAS RICHARDS
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A clarion call for taking back the American Revolution from the far right, published for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence

Who gets to claim the legacy of the American Revolution and the mantle of patriotism that goes along with it? In a sharp, irreverent, deeply informed account of the nation’s founding moment and its enduring legacies, historian Thomas Richards Jr. invites us to see the Revolution not just as a one-time fight for political freedom from Britain but as an ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and social and political independence for all Americans.

A riveting work of narrative history, The Unfinished Business of 1776 shows that the Revolutionary struggle did not end in 1788 when the Constitution was ratified. Across nine dramatic chapters, Richards introduces readers to the vividly drawn characters who kept the Revolution alive for the next century and beyond, including the women’s rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray, the enslaved rebel Gabriel, the economic reformer Solomon Sharp, and the religious visionary Joseph Smith—each pushing for freedoms that extended well beyond the traditional narrative of the Revolution, and each revealing how the unfinished work of 1776 fueled demands for economic, social, and legal equality that lasted well beyond the Revolution itself.

A myth-busting book about the history we think we know, The Unfinished Business of 1776 is the perfect antidote to jingoistic celebrations of America—offering an inclusive vision of our common past.

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My Review: The author's biography on his publisher's website is below:

Thomas Richards Jr. teaches history at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia and holds a PhD in History from Temple University. The author of Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States and The Unfinished Business of 1776 (The New Press), he lives in Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania, where George Washington once camped.

He's got credentials, he's teaching at a level I wish more PhD-holders would teach at, and he's singin' my song. He wants the left to take back the ideals of the 1776 Revolution from the the reactionaries and right-wingers.

The case studies for his assertion that the Revolution contained the seeds of progressive action are decent; I myownself flinch away from his inclusion of that lunatic religiosifier Smith. He belongs, however; my distaste for him and the people who have used his example to create a polity I abominate, reject, and hold in deep scorn notwithstanding, what he set in motion is part of what's foreseen and protected in the US Constitution.

I had not heard of Judith Sargent Murray, for example, or her advocacy of woman suffrage, and am glad I now know she existed despite her being primarily a poet. In filling the great gaps that exist in my own knowledge like this one, the author does me a great service. I suspect many will be less offended than i was by the pro-religious threads he weaves generously into his analyses.

I would rate this book lower than I do had I not found this passage in the author's epilogue:

Trumpism is also predicated on easily disprovable, often dangerous or malicious lies, unbridled demagoguery, and an open embrace of anti-intellectualism—all of which the Founding Fathers abhorred. The Founders were undoubtedly flawed, but they did not lie egregiously, embrace fanaticism, or celebrate stupidity.

Preach, Brother Richards.

ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel, return to Pointe-Noire in fantasyland

DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 all editions, preorder now for delivery 16 September 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of Africa’s greatest living writers, a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history

One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two in a pair of flared purple trousers in which he is now trapped forever. All around him are the other residents of the cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death to share.

Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa’s jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.

Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is an exuberant, phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most-recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: As Pointe-Noire enters my awareness more and more, I realize why Author Mabanckou focuses his storytelling in this fictionalized hometown. He works inside a head that, like all of us, was intensely of a very specific time and place, now gone; he uses it with delicacy to cast its shadows broadly; and he knows it so well to know how it maps onto the world.

Liwa's journey in a fantasy afterlife is aptly compared to Lincoln in the Bardo above. It resembles that story in that it assumes an afterlife, or a between phase between death and nothingness more precisely, in which a soul may wander to seek answers. I myownself found, for one of the few times ever, the use of second-person narration for Liwa's PoV to be very effective. It truly works because it points up the here-but-not-here nature of a dead narrator. However much I doubt this space exists on some immaterial plane, that is not how it is used in this story. Liwa's self is not dead yet, and is surrounded by other not-dead-yet folk (whose narratives are all presented in third person, blessèdly sidestepping that twee trap) who populate his spectral graveyard. He needs to finish something before he can pass into whatever comes next. The other dead folk discourage him, but he does it anyway.

They are right, of course, because he can't prevent his grandmother from feeling her feelings and, as he begins to process his jumbled, violent last memories to solve for himself why he is dead at only twenty-four, the answers are deeply, well, upsetting and traumatizing...as I expect anyone dead at twenty-four would find them, no matter what the reasons were.

It is in the use of a fantasy world, one magical and tailored to Liwa's exact needs, that the story works its universalizing magic. As Liwa moves through his graveyard peers, he listens to their various tales and discovers his own. "Once you've been laid in the earth, time will start to do its work, and for all their good intentions, the people who knew you will gradually forget, till one dry season comes when not a soul ventures forth to your tomb." The truncated youth is only going to fade from others' lives. It is best to let go sooner rather than later; learning too much about your death won't make Death better.

I was very taken with the way this fantasy world was populated by persons previously alive as well as personifications of cultural great ones, like Black Mamba, the big boss of the dead. I totally got Liwa's inability to let go of the need to know what happened to himself, and his disgusted outrage at the facts around his death. It is Author Mabanckou's writing career to bring to light the consequences of blind superstition, greed, and amoral indifference to others' suffering. In this vivid, intense narrative of those consequences for one young purple-trousered ghost/entity, he shakes a well-informed finger in our readerly faces.

Of my three Mabanckou reads, this one is the standout, and the one I'd encourage you all to read.

ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE, a memoir of home going; & BLACK MOSES, multiple legends remixed

THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling meditation on home-coming and belonging from one of "Africa's greatest writers" (The Guardian) and the Man Booker International Prize finalist and Grand Prize Winner at the 2015 French Voices Awards

Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When he finally came back to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on the Congo's southwestern coast, he found a country that in some ways had changed beyond recognition: The cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture had become a Pentecostal church, and his secondary school has been renamed in honor of a previously despised colonial ruler.

But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture that still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Now a decorated writer and an esteemed professor at UCLA, Mabanckou finds he can only look on as an outsider in the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother, and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to the Republic of the Congo, his work recalls the writing of V. S. Naipaul and André Aciman, offering a startlingly fresh perspective on the pain of exile, the ghosts of memory, and the paths we take back home.

"This is a beautiful book, the past hauntingly reentered, the present truthfully faced, and the translation rises gorgeously to the challenge." —Salman Rushdie

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My Review: "You can't go home again," in the truly deathless formulation of justly neglected writer Thomas Wolfe. It is the reason the memoir exists. Humans need frameworks, limits on their sense of their life. Our brains are pattern-making and storytelling machines. It's a survival tactic..."is that weird shadow a tree in the moonlight or a predator?" kept your ancestors alive. Author Mabanckou, not a lot younger than I am, felt the need to reckon with Home in a story. Well, what do you expect from a prolific novelist and poet who makes his living from teaching UCLA students about literature?

In just about two hundred pages, he tells us the story of his two-week return to Pointe-Noire, left twenty-five years ago so of course much changed. In the course of returning, the emigrant/exile/fugitive from home will notice the many changes time has wrought. I expect almost all of us, whether we left our hometowns or home countries or not, can relate to the "OMG the old {thing} is now {opposite thing}!" internal conversation. Not that many of us use that near-universal experience to relive and explain our upbringing to others. Author Mabanckou tells us of his family, how they moved to the city of Pointe-Noire on the Congolese coast from a small village in pursuit of safety and opportuunity. The manner of family order is something US families could definitely learn from. No child is more attended to, more broadly exposed to the worldviews of others, than those raised as he was in his mother's extended family. The family moved, not just his mother and stepfather, so she was not stranded in a new city, left to her own devices to raise and support her child.

Compare and contrast, y'all.

Thinking back to my childhood, when we hid in the lantana fields near the Agostinho Neto airport and hunted iridescent beetles or fished for minnows from the banks of the River Tchinouka, I replied to my friend, with his "Parisian Negro" arrogance:

"These children aren’t in a paradise of poverty. Here, look at the photo: that tire, those flip-flops…that’s what makes them happy…flip-flops to walk in, the tire they can all climb aboard like a motorbike big enough to carry all their wildest dreams. Every day my nephews and nieces walk out in a long line down the rue du Louboulou. Their childhood knits them together, they wouldn’t swap it for all the world. They drink from a small glass, but it’s their own. Your glass is big, but it’s not yours, and each time you want to drink from it, you have to ask for permission."

Growing up in a time and place where your assumptions are formed in a conversation with the assumptions of others, all of whom possess a stake in your life, is a beginning to be envied, to be emulated; it results in a less monadic, less greedy, less needy life as an adult. Author Mabanckou has lived in Europe and the US for decades, he knows the issues and differences that monadic living brings because he was raised outside them.

Thinking of home as he returns to the place where it was allows him to give us twenty-five separate récits we'll agree to call chapters. In his head with him, we look into his past with a fond eye, seeing ghosts of places and of lives we once fully filled but now can't do more than tell stories to an audience about. It's part of getting old. It's part of defining yourself for yourself. it's part of accepting what some simply can not: Some of us are outsiders by nature. Author Mabanckou, in leaving Pointe-Noire then returning after a life away from it, embraced the outsider role. Many of the best storytellers do.

What struck me forcibly was the absence of any explanation, or hint of a reason, why he did not go home for a quarter-century. I thought it might have to do with the familial expectations that this "rich" relative would be able to (and willing to) give them a lot of material security. The way he navigated expectations and demands is the matter of the second half of the book. It was perhaps more important to Author Mabanckou than to me, but it was not a very involving way to end a very short tale in my opinion.

Hence the lack of a fifth star for this very well-written, very interesting story.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BLACK MOSES
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017

It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But over at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of terror of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the institution's corrupt director.

So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles?

Black Moses is a larger-than-life comic tale of a young man obsessed with helping the helpless in an unjust world. It is also a vital new extension of Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

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My Review: Congolese Oliver Twist-cum-Count of Monte Cristo tale of life's many injustices, prejudices, and petty grudges.

It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I' d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. A long name, which in Lingala means: "Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors" as it still inscribed on my birth certificate today.

Moses begins his tale in the truly out-Dickensing Dickens orphanage where tribal violence has landed him. Growing weary of life under the ever-more-crushing thumb of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako (whose first name is the bitterly ironic French for "God's Gift") he makes his escape to the big city of Pointe-Noire (see memoir above for its first appearance here). The reasons Moses, who hates his name, runs away is to escape Dieudonné's revolutionary Marxist-Leninist insistence that people are machines to be programmed, not souls to be nurtured; and thus need no kindness or guidance but just rote training. Where better to demonstrate the effectiveness of this than an orphanage?

Shedding his awful life and assuming a new name, "Black Pepper," does not stop Moses' apparent destiny from hounding him. Throughout this short...under two hundred pages...novel (maybe a novella, but a fairly borderline case if so), he is hounded by Dieudonné and his cadres. It cannot be allowed for someone to resist the Revolution! Isn't it funny how very much the high-control cultures of religion and revolution resemble each other? Almost like they're really the same thing, only in different suits.

The major issue in reading about Moses is that he spends at least half the book in Dieudonné's clutches being tormented, then after escaping (with his twin tormentors, having survived their hazing and gained their respect thereby), we get less of his Pointe-Noire exploits than necessary for us to invest in him as a full character before he unravels psychologically (surprise! not) and we get a cursory account of that causal event. His healing journey takes him through folk medicine to Western psychiatry, both getting deeply disrespectful narrative treatment.

Animal harm is done. Be warned.

The parable in all this appears to me to be the Dickensian nature of the revolution against the horrors of colonialism. We follow the hapless chaff that is Moses/Pepper as the forces of Control use their notable supply of zeal to oppress and destroy what resists their efforts finally succeeds. It is short, so perhaps there was too much story for too few pages...? I'll read Author Mabanckou's writing as translated by Helen Stevenson for a lot longer than this took.

A story that resonates in times gone fascist more than when I first read it in 2017.