Coda: Returning, Remaining

The design of the Liberty Bell Center (LBC) in Philadelphia brings the problems with the nationalist narrativization of the Revolution into the twenty-first century. Its architecture celebrates the Revolution as the inception point of progressive U.S. liberal democratic freedom, and the bell as the exultant symbol of democracy’s perfectibility. However, the pavilion stands on the former site of the President’s House, where people enslaved by George Washington lived and worked during his presidency. Through a discussion of the symbolic distortions of the LBC as well as its violent exclusions of Black and Indigenous history, the coda describes how the politics of memory on Independence Mall help to outline some of the alternative directions for revolutionary thought and movement that this book describes.