On the 250th anniversary of the United States, some details of the celebrations might seem familiar from the celebrations in 1976 of America’s 200th. People sip from cans decorated with the Liberty Bell and a big round number. Commemorative vehicles drive or fly around with founding documents. Federal dollars and private donations flow toward politicians’ goals. A president directs federal funding toward his pet projects.
A big difference is just how prominent Trump is making himself this time around. It wasn’t always headed this way: Congress created the United States Semiquincentennial Commission in 2016, during the Obama administration. In 2020, Trump created the 1776 Commission—an advisory body committed to propagating whitewashed American history—which Biden disbanded on his first day in office in 2021. Trump reassembled it in 2025, more determined to make the national birthday about him, his followers, and their shared visions of the past. While Richard Nixon sought to leverage bicentennial funds to motivate political support in the 1970s, Trump uses the semiquincentennial moment to promote himself. Trump is even attempting to align a semiquincentennial UFC match with his own 80th birthday.
As historian Marc Stein traces in Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s, a national birthday can launch a much broader, more inclusive, and ambitious national project. Yes, the bicentennial too involved politicians advancing their own aims, and it involved selling things, with a proliferation of commemorative objects. But the events and their backlash also helped promote broader goals. Stein writes of the urban planners who sought to direct bicentennial resources toward remaking cities and revamping tourist destinations. He writes of the contingent of the New Left that hoped to rekindle what they viewed as the radicalism of the founders, and of marginalized communities, who mobilized for a reexamination of American history and for reform in contemporary society. Sometimes these groups disagreed about the past and agreed on the future. Sometimes they disagreed about the future, despite shared ideals of the past.
More than the Parade of Sails that glided into New York harbor, the bicentennial was about participating in a democracy and cultivating a reinvigorated sense of the past. In Stein’s accounts of Gay Raiders leader Mark Segal handcuffing himself to a banister overlooking the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall, and of Black and Indigenous activists protesting mistreatment of their communities, he shows how commemorating the past can challenge the present and the future, with depth and force. And in a year when many Americans may turn away from the Trump-infused spectacle of 250th celebrations, Bicentennial also makes the case for engaging with the anniversary and making your own meaning from it.
The official plans for the 200th birthday, headed by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, or ARBA, included ambitious construction projects, formal events, and public spectacle, from the parade of sails to the Freedom Train, a 26-car train loaded with founding documents and Americana, which chugged its way across 48 states.
Even several years before the anniversary itself, resistance to the commemorations began to take shape. In some cases, plans were interlaced with corruption and self-dealing, as in Philadelphia. Democratic Mayor Frank Rizzo helped Republican President Nixon to win the presidential election in 1972 with his cross-party endorsement. In turn, Nixon promised to give Rizzo’s Philadelphia a central role in the national birthday party. Bicentennial planning threatened to displace Black Philadelphians, with designs to bulldoze Black neighborhoods to make way for a bicentennial world’s fair and urban renewal projects. In response, Black Philadelphians mobilized for representation on planning committees to protect their homes and to add Black histories to the commemorations.
Criticism of the celebrations expanded nationwide. Founded in 1971, the People’s Bicentennial Commission, or PBC, was the largest group of activists who wanted to use the bicentennial to push reform. In December 1973, the PBC disrupted a Boston Tea Party reenactment by staging a Boston Oil Party to protest oil companies and urge Nixon’s impeachment by “dumping empty oil barrels into the harbor.” In April 1975, the 75,000 Americans who attended ARBA’s commemoration of the Battles of Lexington and Concord met tens of thousands of protesters waving flags with antiestablishment messages and shouting, “Who elected you?” at President Ford. The PBC spent July 4, 1975, at the Jefferson Memorial, conferring satirical awards on various ARBA endeavors. They honored the Freedom Train, for example, for “impersonating a museum on wheels,” taking aim at the one-sidedness of the history the train showcased.
Many of the celebrations offered a kitschy whitewashing of the nation’s history. Consider the Wagon Train, where hundreds of thousands of horses carried over a thousand riders on wagons. The wagons were to start their journeys on the West Coast, drive across the country, and arrive at Valley Forge on July 4, 1976, commemorating westward expansion—with little thought for the effects of this expansion on Indigenous Americans. Twenty-four tribes met with the president and with ARBA chair John Warner in Washington, D.C., in 1975 to voice their concerns. After the meetings yielded no concrete changes, the Stillaguamish tribe successfully blocked the Wagon Train for two days, in what Stein calls a “staged confrontation” and newspapers at the time called “a ceremonial interruption.” Federal representatives met with tribal leaders to prevent further disruption, and these conversations eventually led to the Stillaguamish tribe gaining long-awaited federal recognition in 1976.
Indigenous, Black, and other communities would dissent, disrupt, and redefine the commemoration at every turn. Robert Burnette, a Rosebud Sioux man who traveled to Washington with his fellow Indigenous leaders, told Warner, “We’ve never had any of that justice—and now you people want to celebrate?” In a public debate televised on PBS, Ebony editor Lerone Bennett Jr. pointed out that “200 years have passed and we’re not free.”
Marginalized Americans knew their histories and continued to live with the uneven allocation of resources and insufficient representation that have resulted from colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other bigotry. They saw the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as an opportunity to protest and to be heard. The results were various and wide-ranging: Sometimes they got a seat at the table, and sometimes they built their own tables, by opening new historic sites and museums, such as Philadelphia’s Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, co-sponsored by the city of Philadelphia and private donations. Activists protested initiatives that compounded structural inequality, and occasionally, they made progress toward the redistribution of resources. Stein defines all the above as part of the commemoration of the bicentennial.
To mark the semiquincentennial this year, I am currently working on an oral history project with the Brown University Class of 1976. When asked about the bicentennial, most narrators picture the Parade of Sails and the omnipresent Stars and Stripes. If they did not see the ships, or if they do not identify with an ultrapatriotic narrative, the oral history interviewees insist that they themselves were not involved. But Stein’s exhaustive research in national and regional newspapers shows how anyone living and breathing during the era took part.
Americans still “benefit from construction, infrastructure, and transportation projects associated with the celebration,” Stein writes, referring to the creation and endurance of projects such as Philadelphia’s marina, pedestrian quay, and sculpture garden, as well as the city’s Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. Americans may bike across the country from Oregon to Virginia on a 4,200-mile trail mapped in 1976, and en route, they may pass many sites successfully recommended by the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation to be National Historic Landmarks.
Stein also argues that even if they don’t know it, Americans today are also “influenced by social justice coalitions that criticized the official bicentennial, challenged the nation’s understanding of its history, and contributed to the democratization of the US left and US society.” The American Indian Movement’s Trail of Self-Determination, for example, protested centuries of displacement and culminated in meetings with lawmakers. Battles over historical interpretation and inclusion created new venues for Americans to participate in democracy: for example, in 1975, Barbara Cameron and Randy Burns founded Gay American Indians in San Francisco. “What should Indians celebrate?” Cameron asked. “Two-hundred years of broken promises, land theft, genocide, and rape? It is one thing to talk about ‘celebration’ and another to look at the little Vietnam the government has going in South Dakota. We’re going to be demonstrating in Philadelphia in ’76. There are plans for demonstrations at Mount Rushmore. Gay Indians will be there.” Activists built on the bicentennial’s platform to begin revising mainstream American history. Books and miniseries such as Alex Haley’s Roots and Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History carried forward this momentum. (And Stein credits Katz’s book for the growth of his own scholarly field of queer history.) Increasingly, engaging history opened a path to reform contemporary society.
This year many Americans may choose not to take part in semiquincentennial events, preferring to avoid celebrations that bear Trump’s name and face. Like the oral history narrators who picture only Tall Ships, they may feel that they are not involved. But they are: The ways that people engage with their democracy and society will shape the understanding of whoever looks back 50 years from now on the U.S. semiquincentennial moment.
While museums and historic sites provide crucial parts of semiquincentennial programming, they aren’t the only ones that can shape this moment. Stein writes on the final page that we can remember the bicentennial “as a transformative moment when social justice coalitions helped democratize our understandings of the past, present, and future.” This broad interpretation of the bicentennial is both an inspiration and a call to action. Stein’s framing of historical commemoration as an opportunity for change invites Americans to show up to the national birthday party with visions of the nation they want.
Bicentennial dares readers to believe that American independence is worth commemorating, in the face of countless existential threats to the country and to the world. Our presence matters—to help shape the country for the next 50 years. But it’s a precarious work: If nations lasted forever, we probably would not mark their birthdays.
