When most people hear fireworks explode in the sky on the Fourth of July, they simply look skyward with wonder.
But John Weaver, a reference supervisor and program coordinator for West Virginia University Libraries who successfully defended his dissertation in the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Department of History earlier this year, looks backward — more than two centuries — to the first, fragile moments of a new nation that was still learning what independence really meant.
He has already spent a lifetime exploring the past and plans to continue doing so.
Raised in Wilmington, Delaware — less than 20 minutes from Brandywine Battlefield — Weaver family vacations were never just beach trips, he said. Instead, they were spring break pilgrimages to Jamestown, Valley Forge, Antietam and Boston’s Freedom Trail. Those journeys, paired with the influence of his father — a regular volunteer at historic sites since America’s Bicentennial in 1976 — ignited his spark.
That spark led him to the College of William & Mary, where he majored in history and minored in German, then across the Atlantic to teach English in Austria and finally to a doctoral program at WVU where he drilled deep into early American material culture.
His dissertation, “Rifles and Riflemen: Material Culture, Violence, and Early American Identity,” traces how the distinctive American long rifle — and the hunting shirts, Native-inspired leggings and deer-tail hat ornaments that often accompanied it — helped colonists see themselves as something new — Americans, not just British subjects abroad.
Weaver delights in reminding people Congress actually voted for independence on July 2, 1776. The familiar date — July 4 — marks the day delegates finally approved the wording of the Declaration. “In 1777, they forgot to celebrate on July 2,” he said, “so the Fourth of July became our national party by default.”
If they’d been better planners back then, we might all be grilling two days earlier.
Weaver sees the holiday as both a cause for celebration and a challenge. “The Revolution is unfinished business,” he said. “Every election, every call to our representatives, every protest, every push for a more perfect union is another chapter. The American Revolution was not just a historical event, it’s a call to action that continues today.”
Part of continuing that business, he said, is telling fuller, messier stories and debunking parade ground clichés, like that the British Army was nearly invincible. Weaver explained most 18th century people would have agreed Prussia and France had better armies.
Other pervasive myths include that there were militia hidden behind every tree, that the Hessians who fought alongside the British were mercenaries and that colonists despised the King when, at least initially, they really hated the British Parliament. Hatred for the King was a later development.
He points to figures like Louis Cook — a half-Abenaki, half-Black officer in the Continental Army — and to battles fought as far west as the Mississippi River to show just how global and diverse the struggle really was.
If history only spotlights New England patriots, he added, “we miss the thousands of ordinary — and extraordinary — people whose choices and great sacrifices shaped the outcome.”
Now settled in the reading rooms and stacks of the West Virginia and Regional History Center, Weaver oversees the team that fields researchers’ questions about everything from Civil War letters to Appalachian oral histories.
And as people spread picnic blankets this Independence Day to watch the illuminated night sky, Weaver will likely be among them, soaking in the spectacle. But he’ll also be the one nudging friends to remember the Continental soldiers who endured a brutal winter at Valley Forge, the French alliance that tipped the scales and the fragile experiment in self government that still relies on the vigilance of its citizens.
“Freedom is a fragile thing people must work to maintain,” he said.
“One of the greatest challenges to the American Revolution was division. The states often did not get along and sometimes refused to cooperate with their neighbors and with the Continental Congress. Had such divisions persisted, they might have proved the death of the cause. In our polarized society just like in 1776, finding common ground still remains the only way.”
