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Posted on 07/20/2026 9:23:55 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
What Students Read In 1776 | The Books That Shaped The Revolution
Have you ever wondered which books shaped the American founding or ignited the American Revolution? What were the students at Harvard and Yale studying in 1776? In this historical analysis, I cover the books the founders would have studied at Harvard or Yale and provide a breakdown of those that would have shaped their thinking. From John Adams, Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, to the famous Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Warren, and Sam Adams, we learn what the founders were reading on the eve of the American Revolution. This is a fascinating topic to me, and I hope you enjoy it.
Have a blessed 4th of July! Enjoy this Independence Day American special.
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Mostly the Bible.
And today, according to some accounts 20% are punctually illiterate. The great books are well beyond their ability to understand.
Well, I don't know how much I'd rely on that source.
Jefferson went to William and Mary, and Patrick Henry didn't go to college at all.
To some extent the problem you highlight can be overcome with audio books.
When people won’t read or can’t read then we can read it to them; for convenience of busy lives or for necessity.
That book is treason, sir! The King shall know of it!
If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior... He has translated Virgil's Aeneid... the whole of Sallust and Tacitus' Agricola... a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's Commentaries... besides Tully's [Cicero's] Orations...Letter from John Adams to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, former tutor to John Quincy Adams, pp. 324-325In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet has he studied morsels of Aristotle's Politics, in Plutarch's Lives, and Lucian's Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer's Iliad.
In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year... I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry of the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson's Euclid in Latin,.. We went through plane geometry... algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions... I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations...[and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.
Compare that curricula to today.
-PJ
Without watching the video - we know the educated elites of America in the 1770s were studying Greek and Latin, and of course, the Bible
Natural sciences in the form of Newtonian physics may also have been an interest for some (certainly Jefferson studied it) but it was not a core part of most colleges curriculum yet.
Social sciences certainly did not exist. Adam Smith at exactly this time began to form the ideas of “political economy,” but again, these were new, fringe fields and certainly not part of any kind of recognized body of study at major colleges.
Fifty Shades of Red White and Blue
A YouTube summary is not always meant to be so literal.
These would indeed have been the books in all of the colleges, including W&M, and even the pre-college studies. Which would cover both Jefferson and Henry.
see tagline
Agreed. Pretty sure the Adams teachings to JQA are a topic in the vid.
Thank you for adding the true written passages for everyone to look at.
At least they didn’t have to read that horrid “Catcher in the Rye”!..............
A “student” in 1776 is not like a student today.
Those who were in school were more highly literate than those in public school today. Someone attending secondary levels of education are more like higher end prep school kids today.
Schools became more “democratized” in the early 1800s. (And even then, they could read and write better than today’s kids.)
I wanted to deal with Holden Caufield myself by the end of that nightmare.
bkmk
Books by Thomas Paine - - (Author of Common Sense)
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