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In the bicentennial summer of 1976, the United States staged what was, by some measures, the largest single celebration in the country’s history. Tall ships in New York harbor. Fireworks over the Mall. Specially-minted bicentennial quarters. A made-for-TV reconciliation after Vietnam and Watergate, after the assassinations and the riots and the burnings of the long sixties. The country told itself, for a few weeks at least, that it was still the country it remembered being.
Fifty years on, the United States is preparing to mark a quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, and it cannot even agree on who is meant to be in charge of the party. There is the official commemoration, America 250, which has been preparing for this moment since 2016, when Congress set up a statutorily bipartisan commission to do the work. And there is, as of last year, a rival: Freedom 250, a Trump White House task force set up by executive order and run by the president and his appointees, which has been quietly siphoning funds and branding from the official commission and staging its own splashier, more overtly partisan events. Meanwhile, the historic sites (Mount Vernon, Monticello, Independence Hall, Boston’s Freedom Trail) are each navigating the politics of all this in their own way, depending on their donors, their visitors, and their nerve.
What does an anniversary do, exactly? Does it suspend our quarrels for a moment, or sharpen them? In a country whose civil religion has always run along the rails of the jeremiad (the sermon that calls a fallen people back to their founding promise), what kinds of jeremiads are being preached in 2026, and by whom?
To discuss whether there is any chance of a consensual 250th celebration in such a polarised environment, Adam is joined by James Morone, the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He’s the author, among other books, of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. And by Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent book, A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic, came out last year. He is also editor of a new collection, The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding, published this spring.
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Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith
