2026 Is Coming, and the New York Times Is On It!

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article by Jennifer Schuessler headlined “Will America Be Ready for Its 250th Birthday?”

As Schuessler noted, this isn’t the first time the newspaper asked such a question:

In 1973, Congress disbanded the original federal Bicentennial commission, after leaked documents suggested that Richard Nixon was seeking to manipulate it for political gain. In 1975, The New York Times reported that the impending celebration featured a crowded calendar but “an uncertain focus.”

And the history on view was not just a whitewashed celebration. There was a growing attention to complexity, contradiction and dissent, thanks to groups like the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation and the left-wing People’s Bicentennial Commission (which disrupted the official commemoration of the Boston Tea Party and even hung Ronald McDonald from a Liberty Tree).

One of the biggest legacies of the Bicentennial, scholars say, was a boom in popular interest in history, and what the scholar M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska in her book “History Comes Alive” calls a more emotional, personal engagement with the past.

The anniversary also generated major investments in history-related infrastructure, and not just in the places where Paul Revere rode or Betsy Ross sewed. According to an 1982 survey, as many as 40 percent of the nation’s roughly 23,000 historical organizations were created in the Bicentennial era.

Indeed, as a child of the Bicentennial myself, I have much more interest and faith in local organizations than in America250, the official United States Semiquincentennial Commission, headquartered in and focused on Philadelphia.

The article notes a March gathering of “300 people from three dozen states” to set up an independent network of historical organizations, including some from this region:

“It’s messy, because democracy’s messy,” said Nathaniel Sheidley, the president and chief executive of Revolutionary Spaces, which operates the Old South Meeting House and the Old State House in Boston. “There’s something fitting about it playing out in this way. If it were boxed and top down, would feel inauthentic to the history.”

At the gathering, there were presentations of research showing that Americans’ views of history are far less polarized than news coverage might suggest. And there was plenty of good-natured ribbing among attendees from Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania over whose revolutionary legacy was bigger and better.

But overall, the emphasis was less on soaring oratory than the nuts-and-bolts of legislation, funding and, for states beyond the original 13 colonies, ways to link the Semiquincentennial to their own histories.

That financial concern points to what I think is the biggest shift since 1976—not that American society is more or less politically divided and uncertain than before, but that the nation no longer shares a consensus on the basic value of government serving the public. The Bicentennial was closer to the New Deal, much closer to the Great Society, than it was to us today.