Rebellion 1776
Rebellion 1776
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Laurie Halse Anderson on Rebellion 1776
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A couch, a pandemic, and sixty missing lettersThe book began with a television scene Anderson already knew was wrong. Sick with COVID in the spring of 2020 and rewatching the HBO miniseries on John Adams, she landed on the inoculation sequence that historians had long found unsatisfying. What the archive actually held turned out to be a better story than anything the screenwriters had attempted.
I got Covid very early after the start of the pandemic, at the end of March 2020, and I got through it, but it was a long and boring time. While I was recovering, I rewatched the HBO series about John Adams, which showed scenes of Adams and their children getting inoculated against smallpox... The truth was much more interesting than the HBO version.
That dissatisfaction sent her to the Massachusetts Historical Society’s digitized archive, where sixty letters Abigail Adams wrote during the summer of 1776 were waiting. The letters documented the family’s walk into Boston for inoculation, their illness, and their recovery, week by week, in Abigail’s own hand. A television dramatization had flattened what those letters made vivid.
Abigail Adams’ letters detailing the inoculation process and her family’s recovery from smallpox in Boston during the eventful summer of 1776 really were the spark for this novel.
Anderson had written three previous novels set in the Revolutionary War era and had steered clear of Boston on the assumption that Esther Forbes’s 1943 novel had covered the ground. Looking at the actual timeline, she found that assumption was wrong by more than a year, and that the most turbulent months of 1776 in Boston had no novel at all.
I was wrong about Johnny Tremain. Johnny Tremain ends just at the beginning of the revolution, the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. So, I thought, okay, nobody’s talked about this space, here I go. And Abigail took me down the rabbit hole and my main character, Elsbeth Culpepper, pulled me out the other side. [paraphrased from audio]
While she was recovering, letters from families arrived telling her they were reading her earlier pandemic novel, Fever 1793, set during the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, aloud together to help children process what was happening around them. That response clarified what the book she was now imagining needed to do: the parallels between 1776 and 2020 were not decorative, they were the point.
It blew me away when I started learning how many families during those years stopped talking to each other because of vehement political disagreements.
Boston in 1776, with its shattered families, ruined economy, raging smallpox epidemic, and public argument over the safety of inoculation, looked, in Anderson’s telling, uncomfortably like the country she was watching from her couch.
How she wrote it
Probate records, a nonfiction false start, and a voice across centuriesThe book that eventually became Rebellion 1776 started out as something entirely different. Anderson drafted a nonfiction picture book about the history of inoculation in America before her editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, redirected the project. The pivot added years to the work and changed everything about the form.
I turned in a rough draft of that originally, and my editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy — who’s a genius, for the record — she said, ‘You know, I think this might be a novel.’
Once the form was settled, the research deepened further. The pandemic had one practical advantage: institutions had digitized their collections. Anderson could read Boston town records, newspapers, and the complete Adams family correspondence without leaving home. To furnish the book’s central house accurately, she turned to a source most novelists never open.
When I was trying to figure out what furniture would be in the house that’s a central setting in the book, I went to the probates, meaning the inventories made of a dead person’s estate of wealthy Bostonians so that I could see the kind of furniture they [had].
Elsbeth Culpepper, the book’s thirteen-year-old narrator, is a kitchen maid. No primary source records how a kitchen maid actually spoke in Boston in 1776. Anderson’s solution was to anchor Elsbeth’s voice in what does not change across centuries rather than in what she could not document.
I don’t think 13-year-olds change that much from century to century.
She gave Elsbeth what she called a ‘pretty fresh attitude’ while keeping the language free of obvious anachronisms, trusting that the emotional pitch of adolescence is more constant than the vocabulary.
By the time she delivered the manuscript, five years had passed from that first COVID-couch viewing of the HBO miniseries. Her editor had to intervene to get the book finished at all, because the archive kept offering more.
Caitlyn had to push hard to get me to actually turn the book in because I could have worked on it for another 20 years.
The chapter-opening primary source quotes that appear in Rebellion 1776, a practice Anderson carries across all her historical fiction, now function as a diagnostic tool during drafting. When she cannot find a period quote that fits a chapter, she treats that difficulty as information about the chapter itself rather than about the archive.
If I’m struggling to find a quotation for a chapter, it usually means I am still struggling to shape the chapter.
What she wants us to sit with
Ordinary people, uncertain outcomes, and a reason to careAnderson’s central argument about the Revolution is that its outcome was not predetermined, and that the version most readers carry in their heads gets that wrong. The Boston Elsbeth moves through is not a city of patriots marching toward triumph; it is a city of frightened, divided people making decisions under pressure. Anderson wants that uncertainty to feel real.
I think we could do a better job depicting the state of the colonies at the start of the Revolution in recognizing that independence was not a done deal. Lots of people supported the King and people were quite divided.
Elsbeth is a kitchen maid who dreams of apprenticing with a seamstress, not a patriot’s daughter or a general’s niece. That choice is deliberate. Anderson sees character type as the mechanism by which history becomes something a reader will actually absorb rather than endure.
When we teach history from the top-down perspective, that means looking at battles and the big leaders and it’s just when you’re 14 or nine or 20, it’s just so dull. But when you tell a story that’s well-researched and vetted... and you can talk about the ordinary people, the regular kids and moms and dads and teachers and seamstresses now, I connect with that person and you care about them. You’re not gonna memorize anything you don’t care about.
She extends that argument about ordinary people into a case for the category itself. Anderson routinely tells teachers to describe her books as adventure novels rather than historical fiction, because she thinks the category label is the obstacle, not the content. Her diagnosis of why readers resist historical fiction is also her explanation of why they don’t resist fantasy.
I like writing about ordinary kids caught up in extraordinary events; that’s why Elsbeth is a kitchen maid with big dreams.
The fourth book in her Revolutionary War sequence, Rebellion 1776 is built on the same conviction that drove the first three: that the founding generation was made up of frightened, fallible, ordinary people, and that knowing that should matter to readers who are inheriting what those people built.