Happy semiquincentennial, party people! But what does one get a 250-year-old that already has everything? (Except for, perhaps, affordable health care and education, a decent living wage, a tax code that doesn’t favor the rich, and a one-person-one-vote electoral system?)
Historian Beverly Gage, in acknowledging the Declaration of Independence’s quarter-millennium mark, toured the U.S. to “think about where we are as a country and where we might want to go.” In This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History (Simon & Schuster, April 7), she writes, “Personally, I’m nervous about the celebrations that are likely to come down from on high, since the powers that be in Washington seem as interested in suppressing history as in understanding it.” However, she sensibly adds, “Much of the task of celebrating the 250th will fall to the rest of us, ordinary citizens who will have to do what we can with what we’ve got where we are. Some people may choose not to celebrate at all, given the state of things. But that’s a shame, since most of us do have to live in this country and might as well figure out which parts of it are worth cheering for.”
The question of what’s worth fighting for is at the heart of Jon Meacham’s American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (Random House, Feb. 17). Many of its essays, letters, and speeches are stirring; they’re tributes to the power of challenging inequities—which, to say the least, is what the American Revolution was about. “We do ourselves no favors by pretending that American history is either cheerfully grand or unrelievedly bleak,” Meacham writes. “Yet it is also true that the United States of America has grown stronger, freer, and more just when it has opened its arms rather than clenched its fists; built bridges, not walls.” (Read our interview with Meacham.)
Another historian, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., is sober-minded—with good reason—in considering the centennial and bicentennial and semiquincentennial. In America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries (Crown, May 26), he writes, “The celebrations—and the 250th is no different—ignore the undeniable fact that the founders made a tragic choice that corrupted the American soul, and Americans have been bound by it ever since.” (Read a Q&A with Glaude.)
Kate Andersen Brower and Norah O’Donnell center women in their survey. Their accounts of bravery in We the Women: The Hidden Heroes Who Shaped America (Ballantine, Feb. 24) include Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man to join George Washington’s army—and survived being shot.
And about that Mr. Washington: As H.W. Brands writes in American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington (Doubleday, May 12), the first president warned that the government “can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy…or any other despotic or oppressive form.” One wonders what he would make of the 47th man to hold his job, a ruler whose fondness for gold filigree, among other things, would likely would have raised many a republican eyebrow.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
