250 Years — What Is America?

Watching the coverage of visitors to the United States for the World Cup has been many parts wholesome and some parts infuriating.

There are endless videos of Europeans (and those from other countries, but primarily Europeans) finding themselves charmed by unique American cultural elements, like giant Bass Pro Shops, country music, free refills and enormous gas stations.

This genre of post is worth digging into more (we’ll do that), but nothing will dislodge the charm of an old man from Lawrence, Kansas, chanting “Rock Chalk Algeria” from my brain after Kansans welcomed the Algerian team to set up camp in their town.

It rules.

There are so many posts that have emerged from this experience that have reinforced the love of the American people in Americans, and I’m not excluded from that experience. The Spanish National Team’s video thanking Chattanooga, Tennessee is outstanding.

This has encouraged a sense of pride in a certain understanding of America, just as we enter the commemoration of our national independence.

_{Wide Left is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.}

Celebration of Americana is seemingly hitting a high as we enter the July 4th weekend and the recognition of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The dovetail of the World Cup and the Semiquincentennial is almost too perfect.

We’ll see more of this as the year goes on; the NFL has already started to make the most of this 250th anniversary and will almost certainly continue to do so as the 2026 season begins.

This feels like a unique moment in American history to be holding this celebration; this is the least “proud” Americans have ever felt in the 25 years Gallup has been conducting the poll, with only 53 percent of respondents telling surveyors they were “proud” or “extremely proud.” From 2001 to 2017, those values exceeded 80 percent every time the question was asked.

When asked whether the word “proud” described their feelings toward the semiquincentennial, only 43 percent of respondents said “extremely well” or “very well” in a poll conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago.

A Marist poll found that 47 percent of Americans believe the country has moved far away from its founding principles and ideals, compared to 30 percent when the poll was conducted 50 years ago on the heels of the failures of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

It is perhaps unsurprising to see dissatisfaction is largest among the youngest Americans, according to a poll conducted by the Hinckley Institute and Deseret News.

There are any number of reasons for Americans to feel dissatisfaction with that identity; whether it’s the United States’ constant and destructive intervention abroad, the support of genocide in Gaza, the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the elimination of foreign aid, rising cost of living (including health care, incorporating cuts to the ACA) and years of institutional failure, including mishandling of the 2008 financial crisis, an inability to resolve the student debt problem or provide adequate housing to the populace.

Regardless, it is difficult for many Americans to see a celebration of the United States and its history without thinking about, well, its history.

The history of Independence Day itself is curious. “July 4” as a date is almost arbitrary; independence and its attendant declaration was approved on July 2, 1776 (the first “vote” for independence), not July 4. This was the date that John Adams thought Americans would celebrate. The document wasn’t signed by the vast majority of delegates (and therefore hadn’t gone into force) until August 2, 1776 (the date on display at the National Archives at the document’s exhibit).

And declaring independence is no more or less legitimate a “starting point” for the American cultural or political project than many others. Americans first fought for independence on April 19, 1775, at the battles of Lexington and Concord. There was no political entity known as “the United States” until March 1, 1781, when founders ratified the Articles of Confederation.

The current political entity and framework of the United States, including documents enshrining what we popularly consider to be American values (like freedom of speech), was not put into place until June 21, 1788, when the Constitution was ratified by the ninth state (New Hampshire), effectively replacing the Articles with this new political structure.

In many ways it doesn’t matter; for the purposes of celebration, one might as well pick a date — any date.

But most “Americans” weren’t citizens in any meaningful sense until decades later; non-landowners first earned a right to vote in 1791, when Vermont entered the union, and most other states didn’t adopt this practice until about 1850 or so (North Carolina didn’t until 1856).

Black Americans weren’t allowed the right to vote until 1868 and weren’t protected in that right until 1870, with incremental changes in access to that right throughout the following decades, most famously with the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Women hadn’t been granted the right to vote in any state until 1869, with only three more states adding the right in the 19th century before the 19th Amendment was nationally ratified in 1920.

“America” was, in some ways, accessible to some of these groups but not to others. Nobody captured this better than Frederick Douglass in his speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

So, while there was an America for 250 years, there was no America for Americans for decades afterward. One would be hard-pressed to make the case that most Americans were afforded the privileges of the name until more than a century after its original founding.

That’s why it feels useful to ask “What is America” when we celebrate its anniversary. The anniversary commemorates a date when many people did not have an America that they could call theirs. So is it 250 years of America?