They had just been treated to a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, which Congress had officially adopted less than a week earlier. After hearing calls to "dissolve the political bands" of tyranny, they marched to a public park that featured a statue of King George III, Britain's ruler, and knocked the 4,000-pound statue off its 15-foot pedestal.

The head of the statue was then decapitated and perched on top of a spike, and much of the rest was melted down to make 42,000 musket balls for American soldiers.

The historian Erika Doss thought of that scene recently while watching protesters toppling statues of Confederate heroes. Doss, who recounts the 1776 episode in her book, "Memorial Mania," sees a parallel between the colonists who fought against Great Britain and protesters who rail against Confederate monuments today.

"They're patriots," says Doss, an American studies professor at the University of Notre Dame, of today's protesters. "They're looking at the symbols and these visual and martial emblems and icons in their midst and they're saying this doesn't stand for who we are today."

It's easy to be cynical this Fourth of July weekend as the US celebrates its birth. The country seems like a mess. Racial protests have rocked every major city. Unemployment has soared. And Americans can't even agree if they should wear face masks in the middle of a pandemic.

But what some see as chaos, others see as an explosion of patriotism. They see it in the armies of Americans that took to the streets to protest racism. They see it in the companies that are taking unprecedented stands against racial and social injustice.

Even the Americans who are wearing masks for the health of their neighbors -- they, too, are reasons to wave the flag.

All of these different groups have declared their independence from symbols and ideas that they've decided no longer represent them, Doss and others say.

They are doing what their ancestors did in 1776, Doss says: "They are reimagining themselves and the nation."

America is bending toward justice

The evidence of this reimagining is reflected in the headlines.

Something has shifted in America when the Mississippi state flag, which bears the cross of the Confederate battle flag, is taken down while the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement soars to an all-time high. Recent polls suggest that this year's BLM protests, which drew as many as 26 million people, were the largest movement in US history.

Black Lives Matter has been described as everything from a hashtag to a "symbol of hate." But the movement has rarely been described as something else: one of the finest examples of patriotism in modern America.

The protesters who flooded the streets this spring to protest racism exemplify the revolutionary spirit of America just as much as the white colonists in powdered wigs, says Melanye Price, a professor at Prairie View AM University in Texas who specializes in African-American politi