Under the threat of censorship and other forms of menace (the Trump Administration this year has so far fired the Archivist of the United States and the Librarian of Congress and has tried very hard to get the Smithsonian Institution to do its curatorial bidding), some organizations have decided to do nothing at all, as if they could simply pretend that the nation was not about to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its birth. “People are terrified,” one art-museum curator told me, not only about what to exhibit but about what to write on labels. She says she keeps asking herself, “Should I just put the stuff on the wall and say, ‘This was made in this period?’ ” Others are opting to un-celebrate and, instead, to denigrate the anniversary, following the logic of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s original introduction to the 1619 Project, which cast the Revolution as regrettable. “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Hannah-Jones had written, a claim to which some prominent historians publicly objected, leading the Times to issue a partial correction (“some of the colonists”). One group of historians, for instance, is planning a panel discussion at an academic conference on whether it would be better to “smear” the Revolution than to commemorate it.
Even those cultural organizations, from historic houses to public-school districts and universities, that have decided to do something for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth appear to be doing considerably less than they did for the two-hundredth. For the bicentennial, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a nearly seven-thousand-square-foot blockbuster exhibit on Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; critics may have found it tacky, but it became a hugely successful travelling show. For 2026, the Met is planning to display, in the American Wing, thirty-two works from its own collection; one colleague of mine referred to putting on this exhibit as effectively “staging a die-in.” A frustrated curator told me that this modest scale is all the Met can do because “Look at the moment we’re in.”
Another option is to try to capture this moment. The New York Public Library’s bicentennial exhibit, “The American Idea,” displayed the Bay Psalm Book, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, but for next year the library is planning to ask visitors to reflect on the meaning of the anniversary, and to archive their answers. In the nineteen-seventies, National Public Radio, with generous funding from the N.E.H., staged a yearlong series of three-hour Saturday-morning call-in programs called the “American Issues Radio Forum.” Given that the Trump Administration has gutted the N.E.H., defunded NPR, and shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it’s difficult to see how public media can mount anything as ambitious as was achieved a half century ago. A spokesman for NPR told me that its two-hundred-and-fiftieth agenda is “still in the planning phase.”
A year, these days, is a lifetime. In 2024, the Declaration House in Philadelphia—a bicentennial-era reconstruction of the building where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence—installed “The Descendants of Monticello,” a hauntingly beautiful and provocative work by the artist Sonya Clark. Clark placed large video monitors behind the building’s windows, turned outward toward the street, so that passersby were met by the filmed and photographed eyes of the descendants of the people Jefferson enslaved, including his own descendants by way of Sally Hemings. Declaration House is part of Independence National Historical Park; under the new regime, no Park Service site will be allowed to display any exhibit that does the essential work of scrutinizing the relationship between liberty and slavery in American history, or the relationship between Native nations and the federal government, because to do so is now considered advancing a “corrosive ideology.” The President’s House Site, built atop the foundations of the mansion where George Washington resided while in Philadelphia, has been asked to review panels describing the lives of nine people who lived there as Washington’s property, owing to the Administration’s requirement that any displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” be removed. Under this logic, to note that Washington owned slaves is to disparage him but to pretend that those nine people never existed comes at no cost to their memory. (Online, citizens have been archiving signs slated for destruction under the hashtag #SaveOurSigns.)
The hurdles facing museums and other institutions make it particularly impressive that many have already launched or are about to launch remarkably thoughtful two-hundred-and-fiftieth exhibits and activities. This month, History Colorado will open an N.E.H.-funded exhibit called “Moments That Made US,” featuring artifacts that mark turning points in American history, including Nixon’s tape recorder, the inkwell that Grant and Lee used to sign the surrender at Appomattox, one of the first copies of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo printed in Mexico, and some moon rocks brought to Earth on Apollo 11 in 1969. Jason Hanson, History Colorado’s effervescent chief creative officer, told me that he thinks of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to talk about what it means to be an American and what we want it to be going forward.” He also thinks that it’s easier to be sunny about the two-hundred-and-fiftieth outside the original thirteen colonies, which he calls the “OG13.” “We are ready for an American history that doesn’t always say, ‘The meaning of this event is this,’ ” Hanson told me. “We are having an argument in the country about the meaning of events.” He’s up for it. He’s likewise excited about the state’s plan to commemorate the nation’s birthday, which is also Colorado’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, by organizing teams to climb the state’s fourteeners, mountains taller than fourteen thousand feet. (Climbing mountains turns out to be wonderfully semiquincentennial. “Climb the Mountain, Discover America” is the slogan for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth used by Monticello, Jefferson’s mountaintop home, which will be unveiling a new center for history and citizenship.)
Back on the edge of the Atlantic, another early stunner is “The Declaration’s Journey,” which opened on October 18th at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution and traces the travels of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence across centuries and continents. “We tell the story of the Revolution all the time,” the exhibit’s curator, Philip Mead, told me. (Mead is a former doctoral student of mine, and I should be clear that I’ve got about as much distance from this topic as a letter has from an envelope.) He said, “You know what they say about stories? There are two plots. A stranger comes to town, or a man goes on a trip. We’re telling those two stories here. The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.” The exhibit opens, by way of prologue, with two borrowed artifacts: the wooden Windsor chair in which Jefferson is believed to have written the Declaration, on loan from the American Philosophical Society, and a rusted metal prison bench, on loan from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, from which Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.
