America is turning 250. Some people are grappling with how — and what — to celebrate

As the U.S. Celebrates its 250th natal day this weekend, some Americans power be struggling to acquire in the company modality, says a Yale historian.

“It feels like Americans only have two choices, which is either to say, I'm a patriot and I only say good things about the country. Or this place is the worst: it's full of injustice and horror and violence,” said Beverly Gage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of history at Yale University.

“Most people, I think, are pretty dissatisfied with needing to choose between those.” 

In her new book, This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, Gage travelled around the U.S., visiting historic sites to explore the tensions in her country's history — and what they reveal about this moment.

She spoke to The Current’s guest host Piya Chattopadhyay about what she learned. Here is part of their conversation. 

Anniversaries are often an opportunity to take stock of how far you've come and where you're going. So on America's 250th, what are you reflecting on?

I'm reflecting on some of the complexity of this moment. I set out to write this book in part to look at the tension between patriotism and history and to explore whether it's possible to really know the history of the United States and still say that you love this country. And I came through saying that yes … this is a moment for celebration and commemoration and reckoning, and I hope some curiosity about the past.

This anniversary comes at a divisive moment, I don't need to tell you that. A recent Gallup poll shows 77 per cent of Americans believe the founders of the United States would be disappointed at the current state of your country. What does that say to you about where your country is at, in 2026?

I do think that that speaks to a couple of things. One is, I think, some dismay about the concentrations of power that we're seeing in the presidency, which is very much not the vision of the founders, who were quite concerned about concentrations of power in a single individual.

But I think we're also at a moment of just real ambivalence for many Americans about what this moment means. And in particular, whether we're still in the story of "American progress," whether the future is gonna be better than the present or the past. And I think a lot of people are very worried that it won't be.

We're having this conversation just months after President Trump signed an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. It strips signage and education from the Smithsonian and national parks on slavery, Native American history, Black history. His celebration of 250 includes the White House State Fair and freedom trucks travelling around the country. Critics say the trucks are overly religious, gloss over aspects of history, including slavery and racial injustice. As you best can understand it, what version of the United States does the president of the United States want people to celebrate?

Trump loves a very triumphal story of the United States. And if you go to national park sites in the U.S., there are now signs hanging there that say, if you see any display that unduly disparages a fine American of the past, report this to your federal government. So it's very much wanting to emphasize the positive, wanting to emphasize the triumphal.

Now, certain pieces of that, of course, make sense for a moment like the 4th of July, 2026, the 250th. But what's really concerning about the Trump administration is that they are trying to suppress in very explicit ways, especially Black history, but other forms of history that they simply don't like. And it's a real tragedy that a moment like 2026 has become a moment to defund and attack the very institutions that produce our public history. The bicentennial produced a huge wave of investment in and creativity around public history and now we're seeing very much the opposite.

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I wanted to ask you about that because this anniversary, of course, we live in very deeply, divided, polarized times, but the bicentennial? What was the mood like then?

Well, the bicentennial was also in some very deeply, divided and pessimistic times in certain ways. It was 1976, and that meant that the United States was just coming off of the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon. [The U.S.] had just crashed to the end of the disastrous war in Vietnam, was mired in economic crisis. And so it's not as if this was a moment when there wasn't division or worry about really fundamental parts of American history. That's been true every time we've had a big celebration like this, but I do think in 1976, people managed to come together to some degree, at least in a non-partisan way, whereas now a lot of, at least the official celebrations coming from on high, have a very partisan cast to them.

Is there a place that stands out for you, in terms of, that it changed the way you saw the country?

What comes to mind is when I went to Tennessee, and I went there to look at the period of the 1820s and 1830s, which was really dominated by Andrew Jackson, who became president and was just the political figure of the age. His home and plantation is still there and operating as a historic site. But I also wanted to look at one of his signature policies and one of the great cruelties of American history, which was Indian removal. The process by which Native peoples were removed from the American southeast, west of the Mississippi. And as I was going to the many sites that are now being developed to mark the process of Indian removal — particularly around the removal of the Cherokee from Tennessee — I really learned a lot.

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I was struck by something that I hadn't realized before I set out, which is that the vote on Indian removal in Congress was incredibly close. And so it's this piece of American history that we think of as being sort of over-determined, almost fore-ordained, but there was a huge debate in American society about whether this was fair or just. Whether this was the only option. And so it gave me a sense that history is alive, it's full of conflict, it's of visionaries who try to make a better world. And I had never seen it in that context before, but it really changed my understanding of that whole period.

Audio produced by Shyloe Fagan, Cecelia Armstrong and Alexa MacKie. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

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