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Rebecca Brenner Graham

Rebecca Brenner Graham

Rebecca Brenner Graham is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. She is the author of Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins' Efforts to Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany and is currently writing a history of the American Revolution in popular culture.

An 1818 John Trumbull painting of the presentation of the draft Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence Was Breaking News. Here’s How the Founding Document Reached the American Public

A new book by historian Emily Sneff records the journeys of the Declaration’s first printed copies, tracking their reception in the Thirteen Colonies and overseas

A depiction of George Washington and his mother, Mary Ball Washington, attending a ball celebrating the surrender at Yorktown in 1781

The Reinvention of George Washington’s Mother, From Paragon of Virtue to Greedy Shrew to Widow Striving for Independence

A new biography examines how 19th-century Americans remembered Mary Ball Washington, who raised the future president largely on her own after her husband’s death in 1743