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 invites readers to examine water as an active force in U.S. history rather than a backdrop to national development. Complementing traditional historiographies and drawing on blue humanities, we reframe national narratives by linking the country’s oceanic reach to domestic hydrology and imperial expansion, positioning the United States as a key driver and emblematic case of the “blue acceleration.” A water-centered lens reveals how water availability and management extended state power, created sacrifice zones, fostered uneven development, and continue to test American democracy. The essay offers a conceptual map for reimagining the U.S. past and human–water relations in a warming world.

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.

This article examines the impact of industrial-era waste crises on the hydrology of an urban New England landscape and sites beyond. It chronicles a time when the city of Providence, Rhode Island, was generating ever-higher volumes of trash despite lacking the infrastructure to send it “away.” Instead, from the 1880s until the 1950s, officials encouraged the conversion of inner-city ponds and lakes into landfills, with each filling more quickly than the last. This trend continued until virtually all low, wet places had been filled, along with significant stretches of the urban coastline. Thereafter, having exhausted other options, Providence began to outsource its trash to an exurban landfill (and from there, across chains of the global waste economy to sites unknown to local actors). It is a largely forgotten history, but as the author illustrates, the hydrological conditions of today are still shaped by the waste management practices of the past.

This article describes the nineteenth-century landscape of surface water distribution in cities of the U.S. West, focusing on its persistence after the advent of modern water mains, based on studies of San Antonio, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Phoenix, Arizona. These systems of ditches, acequias, zanjas, and canals began as the primary urban water supply, then later comprised a secondary system complementing the mains. Ditch networks shrank in the twentieth century, but this ostensibly obsolete waterscape survived for decades and in many places to the present. Ditches persisted because they continued to serve the purposes of their users, because sanitary reforms abated their former pollution, and because new categories of utility emerged in amenity, heritage, and ecosystem services. The study takes the perspective of users as well as providers and finds, in contrast to conventional stories of hydraulic modernity, a continuing example of “water plurality.”

“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.

When Vietnamese refugees came to the Gulf Coast they were attracted to the region, in part, because of the fishing industry. But their entry into the fishery created friction with white fishers who had fished those waters for years. This friction would result in violence. This article anchors this history in the marine environment of coastal Texas. Many white fishers objected to Vietnamese resettlement because of how the Vietnamese fished. Local fishers had, for years, worried about the fisheries given decades of overfishing and pollution. In this context, white fishers weaponized these very real anxieties to argue that the Vietnamese were a threat to the coastal ecosystem. This threat the Vietnamese supposedly posed to these waters, along with the racism and xenophobia of white fishers, accounted for the depth of division and the degree of violence along the coast of Texas during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It may be time to “de-territorialize historical narratives of the United States.”1 As the premise of this special issue demonstrates, American history has long been told through a land-centered lens—one that treats water as a backdrop or boundary. Yet when we shift perspective to view the U.S. past through water or the shifting interface between land and water, familiar narratives transform. In some instances, literature and film have offered ways of reorienting our perceptions by giving water prominence over land as a driving force behind such narratives. Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic Dune does just that (Figure 1). He centers attention on the fictional desert planet, Arrakis, as the axis of his story. This choice seems to place aridity and desolation at the heart of the book. As the only source of the highly coveted “spice”—a substance that can “bend space” to make galactic travel possible—Arrakis becomes a battleground for interstellar warfare. Below the surface of the planet, figuratively and literally, the indigenous population of desert-savvy Fremen stores untold quantities of water, contrary to the popular view that Fremen society is weak because it is environmentally vulnerable without a sufficient water supply. However, the potential of their water to remake Arrakis is their hidden power, possibly more so than the presence of spice.2

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.

In 1927, the city of Santa Barbara, California, began construction of a rubble mound breakwater to create a protected yacht harbor. The initial breakwater was an L-shaped structure that left a gap between the short “arm” of the breakwater and the shore, and engineers believed this configuration would allow sand to continue its normal movement along the coast.1 The engineers who designed the structure acknowledged that, “The design of a harbor on a sandy coast is one of the most difficult problems of engineering.” They anticipated some shoaling of the harbor and erosion of the beach to the east, particularly during storms.2 Their report framed the breakwater as an experiment in which trial-and-error would lead to an ideal harbor for the city, but they downplayed both risks and costs involved, including projecting that “the annual cost for maintenance will be negligible.”3 This optimism would prove badly misguided, as sand almost immediately began to fill the new harbor.

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the historiography, dredges played an essential role in expanding and retaining the American empire in the Pacific. Dredges built a string of ports on the Pacific Coast, from Seattle, WA to San Diego, CA. Dredges constructed seaports in Honolulu and Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i and Manila Bay in the Philippines. Dredges turned atolls and desert isles, such as Midway, Guam, and Wake, into a constellation of harbors for ships and seaplanes. In short, dredges literally built the infrastructure of the empire.1

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.

Histories of American water have tended to flow in two dimensions, tracing surface waters across horizontal space and only rarely descending into the earth below. Rivers, wetlands, dams, and canals have defined how we understand our relationship with this vital resource, and with the diverse human and more-than-human actors who share it. Foundational works by Donald Worster and Norris Hundley traced the rise of hydraulic societies in the American West, showing how rivers, dams, and aqueducts enabled both state formation and capitalist expansion, while Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi foregrounded water infrastructure in the field of urban environmental history.1 More recent scholarship has explored cultural and social histories of water, including more-than-human perspectives, environmental justice, Indigenous water rights, and the political ecologies of urban and rural water systems, expanding the field well beyond its earlier focus on engineering and state-building.2

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.

Before the planters arrived, the Mississippi River Delta was a swampy jungle. In his 1941 memoir Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy, a prominent member of the regional plantation elite, described what the Delta might have looked like in those early days, with an emphasis on the area’s fluid nature. “A still country it must have been then, ankle-deep in water, mostly in shadow, with mere flickers of sunshine, and they motey and yellow and thick like syrup.”1 But in the early nineteenth century, news had started to spread about the fertility of the Delta soil. The younger sons of plantation families in the eastern states, looking for new land to plant staple crops, began to move west, turning the Deep South of the United States into the vertex of the cotton frontier. In Mississippi they settled near the river, which provided transportation, information, and recreation, in the form of leisure trips to New Orleans. “The real highway was the river,” Percy wrote in his personal history of the Mississippi Delta. The steamer Pargo regularly arrived on Sunday mornings in the Delta town of Greenville. Most people would be in church then, but when the Pargo’s whistle blew, the men immediately stood up from the pews and made for the riverfront, to hear the latest news and gossips.2 Knowledge was an important cargo aboard riverboats like the Pargo.3

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.