We’re already beginning to see a slew of new books that are somehow related to next year’s celebration of the American semiquincentennial. And rightly so. 250th birthdays only come around every  . . . 250 years. The semiquincentennial is a big deal, and yet we are very far from making as big a deal of it as our country did for the bicentennial in 1976. That’s one measure of our sociopolitical sclerosis and loss of collective confidence, I suppose.

And let’s be honest. Aside, of course, from Russell Kirk’s On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, which we will publish in April, most of these new America250-related books aren’t going to be very good. But I can guarantee one of them is going to be smashing: Darryl Hart’s history of Independence Hall, tentatively titled Independence Hall: The History of an American Icon. Creed & Culture will publish the book next fall.

Darryl, who teaches history at Hillsdale College, is one of America’s most accomplished historians. Evangelical history? He’s your man. Calvinism? He wrote the book on it. Politics-and-religion in the U.S.? Multiple volumes. They’re all excellent (and provocative).

So we can’t wait to publish Darryl’s history of Independence Hall. Because Darryl loves and has deep roots in Philadelphia, the volume will be as much a rich local history as it will be an American one.

You would think that this book had been written. But take a look around. It really hasn’t. Plus, Darryl has an eye for the fascinating and incongruous. We’re not only going to get Franklin and Jefferson et al. in this book. We’re also going to get portraitist Charles Wilson Peale. We’re going to get to know Kevin Bacon’s father, Edmund, who as Philadelphia city planner coordinated Independence National Park and the redevelopment of the surrounding neighborhood. And did you know that Independence Hall was the location of the nation’s first natural history museum—back when no one really had any idea what to do with it? The building didn’t even become a national landmark until 1950!

This is going to be a good one.

Photo by Abhiram Juvvadi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons