The anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is just around the corner. Wanna get up to speed on the past 250 years? Check out NPR’s new miniseries, “America in Pursuit.”
Each episode features a special moment from the last two centuries of U.S. history, from the American Revolution to the AI Revolution. First up, what does U.S. history really mean?
To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.
Transcript:
RUND ABDELFATAH, HOST:
Hey, THROUGHLINE listeners. It’s Rund here.
RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, HOST:
And Ramtin.
ABDELFATAH: So, as many of you know, this year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
ARABLOUEI: On July 4, 1776, the declaration boldly announced to the world that 13 British colonies were shedding the weight of empire and separating from Great Britain under the banner of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
ABDELFATAH: A new nation called the United States of America was born. And it would be guided by a radical idea that ordinary people could and should govern themselves, that the noisy chaos of democracy was worth it and possible.
ARABLOUEI: Like all milestone anniversaries, this year is a chance for us to stop and ask ourselves, what is the American story? What have we achieved in the past 250 years? Where have we stumbled, and where are we headed next?
ABDELFATAH: These are big questions, especially right now, when the country is arguably more divided than ever on what the future should look like or even what counts as American history.
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ARABLOUEI: Yeah. There’s no sugarcoating this. As we approach the 250th anniversary, there’s going to be a lot of celebrations and also a fair amount of people who just don’t think there’s much to celebrate.
ABDELFATAH: Where does this leave THROUGHLINE? Well, we knew as NPR’s history show we wanted to do something to mark this year. So we’re launching a new weekly miniseries that’s part of NPR’s America in Pursuit project. Every Tuesday from now until July 4, we’ll feature a different moment from our archives that altogether will take you on a journey through the last two centuries of U.S. history, from the American Revolution to the AI revolution.
ARABLOUEI: Think of it as a time capsule – your weekly 15-minute guide to 250 years. So first up, how do we even think about the 250th anniversary right now?
ABDELFATAH: To help us frame how we are thinking about this anniversary, we called up people across the country to get a sense of how they are thinking about it – historians, museum curators, community organizers, teachers – including…
My instinct is to say – is to call you Mr. Marshall, but I’ll say hi, John. It’s very nice to see you after a long time.
…My own high school history teacher.
JOHN MARSHALL: I have to take care of the social obligations. I was talking to Miss J.
ABDELFATAH: Miss J led my high school decathlon team along with Mr. Marshall. Yeah, I was kind of that kid. Anyways.
MARSHALL: She said, oh, make sure you tell her hello from me.
ABDELFATAH: Mr. Marshall – I mean John – he’s an educational consultant now, so he’s not actually teaching anymore. But like usual, he dropped some knowledge about the founders I hadn’t really thought about.
MARSHALL: If you look at the Founding Fathers, the so-called – the signers of the Declaration of Independence, they were a very unusual group to be revolutionaries. These were some of the wealthier men in America. They had much more to lose than to gain by the – by a notion of revolution. By assigning their names to the declaration, they were committing treason. And I think one of the things that are unfortunately glossed over is, these were not wild-eyed radicals.
ABDELFATAH: And John thinks that the anniversary should be focused on the untold stories of the Revolution and the sacrifices the so-called Founding Fathers made, like how one signer lost all his wealth during the war and died penniless, or how another refused to recant his position after signing the declaration, even though it would’ve saved the lives of his sons who had been captured by the British. Fascinating, important stories. But as we’ve explored a lot on the show, that’s only one part of America’s origin.
ARABLOUEI: The founders were all wealthy white land-owning men. Some were slave owners, too. And yes, the Declaration of Independence – July 4 – is the birthday of the U.S. in one sense. But remember, just a few years ago, we were having this conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones about the 1619 Project.
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NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: This is a project in The New York Times arguing that slavery is the foundational American institution, that our founders were – many of them, if not most – hypocrites who said they were founding a nation on the idea of freedom while engaging in slavery.
ARABLOUEI: The 1619 Project made the argument that the story of the U.S. really begins with the docking of the first slave ships in 1619.
ABDELFATAH: It caused a lot of commotion. And a year after it was published, the 1776 Commission was founded under the first Trump administration with the stated goal of, quote, “promoting patriotic education and a true understanding of American history, countering narratives like the 1619 Project and advising on the 250th anniversary of independence.”
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UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting) USA. USA.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will teach our children the truth about America – that we are the most exceptional nation on the face of the Earth and getting better every single day. We’re not going to let it fail.
(CHEERING)
MARSHALL: I think I may have said this in class a few times. Everything is a pendulum. It kind of swings one way to the other. You know, things get more progressive. Things may get more conservative – back and forth.
ABDELFATAH: It’s not earth-shattering to say that history is political. It always has been – where we choose to start the story, what narratives dominate, who we include.
ARABLOUEI: And for some, 1619 and 1776 miss an even bigger story.
KATHLEEN DUVAL: Two hundred and fifty years is kind of a blip in Native North American history.
ABDELFATAH: That’s coming up after a quick break.
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DUVAL: To me, the 250th anniversary is reminder that we live in a country that was founded on an ideal.
ARABLOUEI: This is Kathleen DuVal. She’s a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She wrote the book “Native Nations: A Millennium In North America.” And while she has a much longer view of history, she still thinks this anniversary means something.
DUVAL: Some people say it’s the idea that all men were created equal. I think more fundamentally than that and more agreed upon at the time, 250 years ago, was the idea that the people can rule themselves.
ABDELFATAH: For Kathleen DuVal, if there’s any unifying thread or metanarrative in the American story, it’s a belief that all the debates and disagreements over the years over who is American and what America is have been crucial to our democracy.
DUVAL: Democracy assumes disagreement. It’s not a consensus democracy. And so it is not a surprise at all that people today have very strong and divergent opinions about our country’s founding because that’s just always been true.
ARABLOUEI: And that’s pretty much what Ron Saikowski told us, too.
RON SAIKOWSKI: We were so disorganized. And people don’t understand – we were not a unified group of colonies. We were at each other’s throats, literally, and sometimes we were disputing boundaries between colonies. There’s a multitude of disputes that we had. And it was through working together and focusing on what they had in common that brought the colonies together. And that’s something we need to look at, learn from that and apply it today.
ABDELFATAH: Ron is on the board of directors for the Heritage Museum in Montgomery County, Texas. He’s helping plan his local 250 celebration.
SAIKOWSKI: We planted a Liberty Tree, a named (ph) species. It was a Mexican red oak, and it has flaming red leaves at certain times of the year, and it’s planted on the grounds of the Heritage Museum.
ABDELFATAH: Ron is well aware that Texas is not one of the original 13 colonies. Though he did point out that Texas beef helped feed the Revolutionary Army.
SAIKOWSKI: Tejano ranchers provided beef and horses to the 13 colonies. The Spanish king would have loved to see England fall big time.
ABDELFATAH: All these places that joined the U.S. as time went on became part of the American story. And for him, that’s what this anniversary represents, too, the many, many perspectives that make up this country – north to south, east to west and even beyond our borders.
SAIKOWSKI: Well, history emanates from not only locally, but nationally and internationally.
ABDELFATAH: And he says knowing that history isn’t just important…
SAIKOWSKI: If you don’t preserve all of that history for future generations to learn from, we’re going to make the same mistakes over and over again.
ABDELFATAH: …It’s also fun.
SAIKOWSKI: I kid my fellow historians that history is the only time you can gossip and get by with it.
YUVAL LEVIN: We have been diverse from the beginning, and we’ve been divided from the beginning, but we are also held together by some key commitments that we still do share in common.
ARABLOUEI: This is Yuval Levin. He’s overseeing the 250th anniversary project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., and he thinks this year is a clear moment to celebrate.
LEVIN: Our country, on the one hand, is something to be celebrated, and we’ll have a birthday party for it when it turns 250. But on the other hand, our country’s also always presented itself to Americans as a kind of sociopolitical experiment, a test of ideals. And that means that in those moments of civic commemoration, we also ask ourselves, are we living up to these ideals?
ARABLOUEI: Yuval actually thinks the Declaration of Independence is the perfect example of consensus.
LEVIN: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. You might say the foremost progressive and conservative voices in that generation of Americans, and that they both shared in that joint project, that they both authored that one document, I do think is a nice symbol of how the American political tradition encompasses the left-right differences, allows both to be expressed, allows us to get some of the best of both, even if we also suffer some of the worst of both.
ABDELFATAH: This is not to be naive or make light of the real differences and how people are thinking and talking about history right now, or the fact that people feel conflicted about whether we should even be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when the very democracy it heralded feels shaky.
ADRIENNE WHALEY: That’s a great question. And that’s one that people have been debating for the past couple of years. You know, is this commemoration? Is it celebration? What is the tone and tenor of what it is that we are doing?
ABDELFATAH: This is Adrienne Whaley. She’s the Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.
WHALEY: I was born and raised in Philadelphia, and so I’ve always had the history of the American Revolution right in my own backyard.
ABDELFATAH: She understands why people might have reservations about this year’s anniversary.
WHALEY: I think what gives me comfort – and I can probably speak for a lot of my peers, as well, or at least, if not comfort, then a sense of groundedness – is that we have never had one clear understanding of what America was or is as a nation.
ABDELFATAH: So for Adrienne, the thing worth celebrating is the fact that we as a country are still striving to figure it out, despite the divisions, obstacles and setbacks over the years.
WHALEY: We at the Museum of the American Revolution, our entire mission is about uncovering and sharing these compelling stories about diverse people and complex events that sparked this ongoing experiment in liberty, equality and self-government.
ABDELFATAH: In the lead-up to the 250th anniversary, the museum has a special exhibit called The Declaration’s Journey. And the part that Adrienne likes the most is right when you walk in.
WHALEY: The coolest thing, like, the thing that you were greeted by when you walk into the exhibition is this display that’s got two things on it. One of them is a Windsor chair.
ABDELFATAH: It’s the chair they believe Thomas Jefferson used when he was authoring the Declaration of Independence. And right next to it…
WHALEY: Is this bench that is – it is turning colors. It is rusting, the paint is falling off of it. It’s flaking, and you can tell that it’s got, like, a long and difficult history. And that’s because it is the bench from the jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his letter from Birmingham jail.
ABDELFATAH: The letter in which MLK famously references the Declaration of Independence in connection to the Black youth that were conducting peaceful sit-ins at white-only establishments. He wrote that they were bringing back, quote, those “great wells of democracy.”
ARABLOUEI: I love this idea of taking two radically distinct objects and finding the connections and layering them together to kind of help us understand this history in a new context. It’s kind of like a history remix.
ABDELFATAH: Right. A history remix, which is exactly what we’ll be doing with this limited-run series, America in Pursuit. Each week, we’ll bring you stories from THROUGHLINE’s archives, only they’ll be shorter and, like any good remix, framed in a different context to help you understand the arc of American history since the Declaration was signed, and the many ways people have pursued life, liberty and happiness.
JOSE RUFINO: (As Frederick Douglass) It must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
ARABLOUEI: We’ll be digging up moments that shape the course of history.
JIM MONROE: No country in the 20th century has ever been as economically dominant as the United States was coming out of World War II.
ABDELFATAH: Reframing ones you might think you already know.
LISA SHARON HARPER: Every single denomination in the United States split based on the question of slavery. Can you own slaves and be a Christian?
ARABLOUEI: And sometimes we’ll get a little weird in true THROUGHLINE style.
TIMOTHY WINEGARD: So in a way, the anopheles mosquito is the founding mother of the United States, and she deserves to have her nice proboscis face tucked in between Washington and Jefferson on Mount Rushmore.
ABDELFATAH: Join us every Tuesday for America in Pursuit, your weekly guide to 250 years of American history.
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