‘As a Briton, I sometimes find the American mania for our island’s history baffling. Then again, growing up in a place that’s lousy with old stuff will do that to you. One of the most important battles of the English Civil War was fought in what is now a park near my parents’ house in Worcester, England. In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited the site to see where, almost a century and a half earlier, their forebears had fought to dethrone a king, showing the world that another system of government was possible.

“Tell your Neighbours and your Children that this is holy Ground, much holier than that on which your Churches stand,” Adams wrote later. “All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill, once a Year.”

Sadly, it does not; instead, teenagers go there after school to smoke weed.’

My contribution to the Atlantic’s special issue on the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence is to ask why Americans still love British traditions like getting a coat of arms.

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