America’s 250th Birthday Should Lead To A Historical Revival

So much for “the shot heard ‘round the world.” 

The nation recently celebrated a quarter-millennium since the first battles of the American Revolution, fought at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. But, as a recent Wall Street Journal column noted, you wouldn’t know it from talking to most Americans. The anniversary of events celebrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 “Concord Hymn” passed largely unnoted and unnoticed, “the shot heard ‘round the world” turning into a quiet squib barely detected, save perhaps for the towns in Massachusetts where the events occurred.

The nation’s impending semiquincentennial — a fancy term for our 250th birthday, which we will celebrate next July — provides an excellent time for Americans to rediscover our nation’s history. In an ideal scenario, the more our fellow citizens recognize the sacrifices that our forebearers made to establish, as Lincoln noted, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” the more we might cherish, value, and nurture those freedoms today.

Americans’ Ignorance

Various surveys over the years have demonstrated Americans’ significant lack of knowledge about their own history. For instance, a 2008 survey by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute noted that only half of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government. In 2014, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found fewer than 2 in 10 eighth graders proficient in American history. As depressing as that statistic seems, another survey five years earlier discovered much worse: In 2009, only 3 percent of Oklahoma high school students could answer 6 of 10 questions needed to pass a U.S. citizenship test. 

I would not consider myself immune to a need for a history refresher. Research for this article brought a painful reminder that the description of Lexington and Concord as firing “the shot heard ‘round the world” came not in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” — which also discussed the events of April 19, 1775 — but from Emerson’s poem written nearly a quarter-century before Longfellow’s.

Impending Anniversary

The anniversary of our nation’s Revolution provides a wonderful opportunity to instill a love of history in generations of Americans — but only if anyone pays attention. On that front, the way in which events in the run-up to the Declaration of Independence have faded into the background provides little cause for optimism.

It makes some sense that the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre received little fanfare, coming as it did in March 2020, when the nation and the world were fixated on the new Covid panic. But the December 2023 anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and the recent commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord, have barely registered in the cultural zeitgeist either. 

The National Archives has arranged a series of exhibits, entitled Road to Revolution, chronicling the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But a few archival documents placed on display in Washington, while helpful and enlightening, cannot begin to scratch the collective awareness of a vast nation’s citizenry. In 1925, the 150th anniversary of Lexington and Concord merited its own postage stamp; a century on, the 250th anniversary of the nation’s birth seems to have prompted a veritable shrug.

More Than a Party

Commemorating the events leading up to, and those that follow, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence serves a critical role in providing the context of the events of July 4, 1776. They demonstrate first that freedom is not free and that winning our nation’s independence required a long, bitter, often painful struggle for millions of colonists, one that often divided families against each other. 

Events like the Boston Tea Party and Lexington and Concord also illuminate the intellectual underpinnings of the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. In some respects, Americans’ lack of historical knowledge explains why nonsense theories that the United States was founded on the basis of slavery have been able to take root. Only by fully grasping the cultural hold that concepts like the “divine right of kings” had on generations of Europeans can we understand the radical nature of a nation dedicated to self-government and the common man — even if, yes, our nation’s Founding Fathers did not always live up to these standards.

States and the federal government should be doing more to commemorate this entire era, such that the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution goes far beyond extravagant fireworks displays next July. But even if governments can’t or won’t, individual Americans can and should learn more about our nation’s history themselves.

I would encourage you to use this anniversary to visit a national park or historical site and read works rooted in the Revolutionary period, such as David McCullough’s John Adams, Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton (the basis of the musical Hamilton), or the young adult novel Johnny Tremain. Knowledge is indeed power, and more Americans should know the powerful story of the generation of colonial subjects who created not just a new nation but a new concept of nationhood.