AHA executive director Jim Grossman and Amy Cooter, research director at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, joined host Lisa Desjardins on PBS NewsHour on July 4 to discuss how the American Revolution has become part of the current political divide. “[The founding documents] contained insights into liberty, into freedom,” Grossman said. “But these men also . . . were mostly men who owned, bought, and sold other human beings. And they lived and had grown up in a world where it was okay to own, buy, and sell other human beings. And to understand what they wrote and to understand them, we have to understand that. This is not a theory. This is a fact. . . . [Historians] do have to help Americans understand that facts are not very useful unless we know how to ask the right questions about them.”