A project of hope and optimism for our 250th

Dear Reader,

I’m excited today to tell you a bit about my next book and project. This week, as you surely know, marks the nation’s 250th birthday — or at least the birthday of its founding document, the Declaration of Independence. It’s also been a tough week democracy-wise and rights-wise, as the Republican majority on the Supreme Court has attacked cornerstones of our country and came yesterday a single vote from undoing the constitutional right to “birthright citizenship.”

American history shows us that these two stories — the advance and retrenchment of freedom — are the same story.

As part of the mouthful that is the “semiquincentennial,” we’re all going to hear a lot about the Founding — the magic of 1776, the brilliance of Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison, the honor of George Washington, the droning debates and arguments that unfolded inside that cramped, hot Independence Hall in Philadelphia — and celebrate the moment quills touched parchment in July two hundred and fifty years ago. But “America 250” can’t just be a tacky birthday party — a state fair on the National Mall, a UFC fight on the White House lawn, and big fireworks display — and it isn’t just about the American Revolution. It has to be a moment when we assess where America has come and where it still has to go.

We began with a document that proclaimed “all men are created equal,” but the reality was that the vast majority of Americans weren’t originally counted in that phrase, at least as Thomas Jefferson intended it. We were from the start better at aspiring to freedom than we were in achieving it. We were born with an unfulfilled promise.

I’ve spent the last year writing about what came next and about all that’s unfolded since 1776 — and what we still have to do.

My new book, “America in 25 Revolutions,” traces the story of how generations of Americans have made the Founders’ vision their own. It’s the story of the idea they left and how the American idea has been lived and shaped by all the generations since. For the great many of the inhabitants of the new United States, then and in the generations to come, who were excluded from realizing the freedom and ideals expressed in that oh-so revolutionary government, July 4, 1776, wasn’t their “Founding.”

Their “revolution” and “founding moments” were still to come.

America is the story of revolutions, plural.

Time and again across the last 250 years, we have had other “founding moments” when the circle that defines “who is American” was erased and drawn larger.

This is a subject I’ve been fascinated with for years — inspired in part by Imani Perry’s amazing book South to America, which in turn inspired a commencement address I gave in 2022 that in the years since has grown into this book.

Across 25 chapters, I trace what the subtitle calls “the 250-year quest of an imperfect country to be a more perfect union,” chapter by chapter exploring how Americans who were left out of that the Founders’ early vision have pushed for change and expanded and rewritten it to include themselves. This is a core part of our story.

America has been always been imperfect — but we strive to be better. As the country celebrates its 250th anniversary, it’s important to remember this dichotomy. The story of our collective history is of a country that strives, generation after generation, to get closer to our founding promise of a nation where all are created and treated equal.

While many focus on the idea the Founders’ birthed, this book tells a slightly different story: How their idea set off centuries of ripples and repercussions that they never could imagined as subsequent generations — including how many people the Founders didn’t consider “citizens” at the time, either legally or morally, seized their idea, made it their own, and wrote themselves into the American story.

Some of these 25 stories, like women’s suffrage or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, will be familiar to you — but many won’t. And even among some of the stories you’ve heard of, you may not realize how transformative and revolutionary they really were; not many people, for instance, realize the Americans with Disabilities Act was actually the most far-reaching civil rights legislation the US ever passed.

Each of these stories, familiar and unfamiliar, is filled with the hope, optimism, anger, and courage of Americans who took that vision of a land where “all men are created equal” and wrote themselves into the Founders’ vision. They made America bigger and better and a country that more closely resembled the aspirations of those founding documents. You will walk away with a whole new list of people who can and should be considered “Founders” in their own right — people like John Bingham, Sarah Winnemucca, Luis Muñoz Rivera, Lewis Hine, Alice Paul, Frank Kameny, Patsy Mink, and Justin Dart, Jr., who forced America to be better.

Recent years have seen big fights over “expanding” our history — that somehow having factually accurate conversations about the Founders or re-centering women, Blacks, Native Americans, or countless others into our primarily white-male-heavy stories of history somehow is “un-patriotic.” But to me writing new people into the familiar American story that we’re used to — telling new stories about new lives previously forgotten or overlooked — doesn’t take anything away from the role, bravery, or importance of the people we’re used to celebrating. Bringing new people into the story of America doesn’t take anything away from those who places in history have already been told and secured. The American story is big enough to encompass all of us.

Taken together, the 25 “revolutions” in this book illustrate the leaps forward of a country that’s often more grudging in its freedoms than we’d like to remember or celebrate. But what makes this country worth fighting for is our collective and individual capacity for improvement. We can make ourselves better, we can make each other better, we can make our country better.

We’re suffering through a national crisis of judicial “Originalism” right now (literally even this week!). Right-wing politicians and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has invented and embraced in recent decades the myth that the US Constitution was meant to be a fixed point on the map — that discerning the rights and liberties available in an age where we can send spaceships to other planets should be limited to the imagination of white men for whom wooden-wheeled horse-drawn carriages represented cutting-edge transportation, or that freedom and privacy in the computer age should be dictated by the ink of quill pens. To me, the great sin of Originalism is how it overlooks the animating principle of our country since day one: The first thing the Founders sat down to do after creating the Constitution was to change it — to start writing a Bill of Rights.

That Bill of Rights is where my new book starts (and it’s not exactly the gauzy, inspiring story you probably think it is!), and in the 24 chapters that follow, in stories about the fight for rights and equality for Blacks, Asians, women, gays, Native Americans, Jewish people, workers, and more — as well as the push for what one might call more “qualitative” rights, for food safety, consumer safeguards, and environmental protections — we see the myriad different ways that change and improvement and the expansion of rights can happen: Supreme Court decisions, yes, but also constitutional amendments, executive orders, congressional legislation, regulatory shifts, social movements, and even the choices of private institutions.

Today, much of our country would astound the Founders. That’s a good thing. That’s, in fact, the best thing about the United States.

Working on this book has been an enormously hopeful and optimistic project — and I hope reading it will be too. America has always been an imperfect country — and it still is. America has dark chapters — sometimes long dark chapters. But dark chapters don’t last forever if we choose to write a different future. Change and progress is hard — and it’s not guaranteed. Rights once won don’t always stay won; the story of retrenchment and regression is as much a part of American history as the story of freedom and progress.

Starting later this month and stretching through this fall, we’re going to publish ten chapters from the book online, week by week, to help mark this summer’s celebration of the 250th. The full book itself will come out for the holidays, right after the election in November, when — whatever happens — we’re sure to be deep into a conversation about how we move forward from this moment we’re in right now.

All of these stories and revolutions help tell us about this moment we’re living through right now. You will see the shadows and echoes of today’s culture wars in chapter after chapter. Studying the past with open eyes, historian Nancy Isenberg says, helps “make it possible to better appreciate the gnawing contradictions still present in modern American society.”

My hope is that through this project, you’ll emerge inspired to carry forward the hard work, done by generations before us, to make this country better.

As we turn 250, there are plenty more chapters of the America story still to write — and revolutions still to win.

GMG

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