This article examines planning for the United States Bicentennial in Washington, DC, focusing on the work of the DC Bicentennial Assembly in the early 1970s, as well as the Nixon administration’s response. While the national bicentennial is often remembered through large federal celebrations on the National Mall, planning in the capital became a venue for local political engagement and advocacy. I show how Washington residents used bicentennial planning to articulate claims about representation, citizenship, and the city’s political future, framing the anniversary as an opportunity to press for greater local control and a more meaningful realization of democratic ideals in the nation’s capital. Federal officials, meanwhile, sought to channel commemorative activity into redevelopment efforts that targeted tourists and visitors, putting forth a different vision for the city. The resulting bifurcation, characterized by Nixon as a “civic schizophrenia,” remains in the present day.

“The Bicentennial is one of the best ways to promote libertarian ideas.” In the early 1970s, the nascent libertarian movement, spearheaded by the enigmatic ideologue Murray Rothbard, co-opted national celebrations of the United States Bicentennial to further their own political agenda. Devoted to the image of a “libertarian founding,” activists engaged in the gleeful work of undoing mainstream historical narratives on the Left and Right, ultimately claiming the spirit of 1776 for themselves. This late-twentieth-century intellectual work has had long-term effects in American politics. This article introduces historians to the as of yet unexplored reclamation work done by the libertarian movement and then moves through its more recent echoes and contemporary resonances. It contributes to literatures on libertarianism, late-twentieth-century political development, and the history of the memory of the United States.

This article examines the Peoples Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a New Left group founded in 1971 to provide an alternative to official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution that culminated on July Fourth, 1976. The PBC has gone down in history mostly as a disappointment for having failed to halt the rise of the New Right. This study, though, takes a longer view of history to argue that the PBC, despite its faults, pursued a red, white, and blue brand of patriotic protest that worked to rekindle traditions of dissent that date from the early republic. By embracing America’s revolutionary heritage and rediscovering forgotten practices, such as staging July Fourth protests and issuing alternative declarations of independence, the PBC helped not only to reinvigorate the left at a critical juncture in the 1970s but to model effective protest strategies moving forward.

“Here come the beads and trinkets,” muttered Doreen Bond (Northern Cheyenne) in a 1975 meeting with the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. Many Native Americans responded to appeals for their participation in the 1976 United States Bicentennial with exasperation, disbelief, and anger. Three Native women, Thomasine Hill (Crow-Pawnee), Clydia Nahwoosky (Cherokee) and LaDonna Harris (Comanche) considered the year an opportunity to advance the discourse with an action plan for rights and dignity. Along with men like Wayne Chattin (Blackfeet), they contested the mythology of the attacking Indian and used their experience working with white institutions and individuals to advance the needs and voices of Native Americans. The Survival of American Indian Association undertook a Trail of Self-Determination, the most significant Indian bicentennial action, traveling from Washington state to Washington, DC, to challenge the American people and the federal government on its continued betrayal of Native American rights.

This article situates the 1976 United States Bicentennial as a critical juncture in the late-twentieth-century transformation and—borrowing from Daniel Rodgers—“thinning” of American understandings of society, state, and nationhood. It demonstrates how, amid economic crises and post-Watergate disillusionment, bicentennial commemorations provided key vehicles for reconfiguring more vernacular and granular conceptualizations of American identity and political economy. Repeatedly, discourses surrounding the bicentennial intertwined pro-enterprise ideals of producerism and economic self-determination with New Left idioms of personal empowerment, authenticity, and liberation. Following three interlinked case studies of bicentennial initiatives that sought to rehumanize American capitalism and restore its moral legitimacy, this article thus traces how less explicitly political commemorative discourses articulated, diffused, and naturalized soon-prevalent pro-market ideas. Ahead of the 2026 semiquincentennial, this article thus situates commemorative occasions not as political sideshows but as key formative moments in shaping Americans’ understandings of society, state, and nationhood.

The 1976 Bicentennial of American Independence was a watershed moment in the history of American memorialization and commemoration. Taking place against a backdrop of national decline and cultural fragmentation, the bicentennial produced several efforts to unite the nation’s hopes for the future in a celebration of its past. By centering the commemorative vision of Elizabeth Gentry Sayad, the indefatigable organizer of St. Louis’s Bicentennial Horizons of American Music (BHAM), this article examines an approach to the bicentennial that feted 1776, not in the hope of returning to a golden age in American history, but with the intention of synthesizing the sounds of the nation into a united forward-looking future. Dynamic and internationally oriented, Sayad’s leadership of BHAM a22s regional texture to the national bicentennial story from an on-the-ground perspective. And it showcases an alternative, conservative multicultural path for engagement in historical co07emoration in the late-twentieth-century United States.

This article situates the United States bicentennial logo within the longer histories of Cold War public diplomacy, corporate branding, and federal arts policy, arguing that it functioned as an experiment in governing through design. Bruce Blackburn of Chermayeff & Geismar Associates Inc. envisioned the soft-edged, modernist “fat star” as a means for healing a nation fractured by the Vietnam War. Yet the logo’s reception exposed the limits of this strategy. While modernist design had proven effective in projecting a compelling image of the nation abroad, when applied to the bicentennial, the response from Americans was divided. Some embraced the “fat star,” while others perceived it as ahistorical, overly corporate, or insufficiently national, sparking debates over commercialization, patriotism, and identity. Ultimately, the bicentennial logo made visible the growing influence of consumer capitalism on American society and exposed, rather than resolved, the fractures of the 1970s.

American politicians and American people have been co-opting the memory of the American Revolution to legitimize their beliefs since the dawn of the early republic. Over the last few decades, these efforts became increasingly more partisan, with explicitly political operators upholding one-sided perceptions of the Revolution as irrefutable truths. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the moment is apt to reflect on the historian’s role in deciphering the politicized historic past. With Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump both claiming legitimacy for their radically oppositional programs by invoking the founders, the symbolic weight and unifying potential of the Revolution are at their breaking point. As scholars, we must strive to understand how we got to this impasse and how we, as a nation, can navigate what historian Michael Hattem calls the ongoing “perfect storm” that runs the risk of permanently converting the Revolution into a fractious ideological weapon.

This essay examines the continued power of white liberal nostalgia in the face of democratic crisis, notably concerning Atticus Finch—hero of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Examining Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 Broadway adaptation, released after Lee’s only other published novel, Go Set a Watchman (2015), which eviscerated the character’s liberal credentials, the essay documents twenty-first-century compromise with what I deem the “Mockingbird creed.” In the context of the widespread racial reckoning that characterized recent decades, the inability of American audiences to reconsider and accept Atticus Finch as a white supremacist reflects a profound limitation in liberal culture and undermines efforts to comprehend U.S. history as it really was and political systems as they really are. In redoubling public commitment to the myth of Atticus Finch, we have failed to learn from its limitations, but instead repeat its platitudes in the face of both antiracist mobilization and democratic collapse.