Gerald Horne is a renowned historian who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and is the author of more than three dozen books on race, colonialism and resistance. His work is especially apt for this anniversary: in The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, he argues that the American Revolution was in significant part a conservative revolt by colonists determined to protect slavery against a London increasingly inclined toward abolition.