William Cobbett (1763 - 1835) Journalist, reformer and MP.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

David A. Wilson is a professor in the Celtic Studies Program and the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Statues pulled down, streets renamed, language revolutionized, education politicized – all in the cause of breaking with a benighted past and powered by people with a sense of absolute moral certainty. And then came the right-wing populist backlash: the assertion of traditional values, the targeting of ideologically suspect immigrants and a determination to return to the better days of an idealized past.

A description of North America in the early 21st century? Not in this case. All these things occurred in the United States during the first years of the republic, and they came close to tearing the country apart. Everything, it has been said, is older than we think it is.

But history doesn’t rhyme; it jars.

Partly influenced by the American Revolution but mainly inspired by the French, the radicals of the time aimed at nothing less than beginning the world over again. In France, the revolutionaries reset the calendar; it was no longer 1789, but Year One of Liberty. American democrats followed suit with their own time zone, dating the dawn of liberty at the Declaration of Independence in 1776. All vestiges of British rule were to be removed; when the statue of William Pitt the Elder, Britain’s former prime minister, was taken down and its subject accidentally decapitated,........

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