I’ve spent much of the past year writing about how we think about the past and what we do with its legacy in the present. As America approaches its 250th anniversary, I’ve found myself returning to those questions again and again, considering them in my own national context. Yet when I sat down to write about the Semiquincentennial itself, I found something unexpected: I wasn’t sure I knew how.
That uncertainty is, perhaps, an occupational hazard of being an early American historian. America’s 250th birthday feels like the sort of occasion I ought to have something meaningful to say about. Instead, I found myself returning to ideas I’d already explored elsewhere, increasingly frustrated by commemorative efforts that often feel historically shallow, overly sensationalized, or simply propagandistic.
In recent months, I’ve found myself approaching that question from two different directions.
During Black History Month, I wrote about Phillis Wheatley on the 250th anniversary of American independence, arguing that while commemorative efforts like the USPS Wheatley stamp symbolically recognize her place in national memory, commemoration alone cannot do justice to the significance of her writing and interventions in Atlantic society. Indeed, Wheatley’s work challenges us to move beyond celebration toward accountability. If her poetry pressed eighteenth-century readers to confront the contradiction between liberty and slavery, it presses us to confront that same unfinished work of justice in our own time.
More recently, I reviewed Sarah Pearsall’s Freedom Round the Globe, a book that similarly urges readers to look beyond familiar national narratives. Pearsall reminds us that when we think about seemingly local (or national) stories, we should ask how they connect to global histories. We should interrogate the (linguistic, social, and cultural) categories we inherit rather than assume they are universal. We should remain attentive to the people who disappear when nations place themselves at the center of the narrative.
Reading them together has made me wonder whether the object of our commemoration has been misplaced. Perhaps it is not the nation itself that deserves celebration, but the communities people have built within it, across it, and sometimes in spite of it. Both encourage us to move beyond exceptionalist narratives and to recognize the interconnected worlds that shaped America from the beginning.
But writing about America at 250, and even taking lessons from Wheatley and Pearsall, has felt unexpectedly difficult. As a historian, I spend much of my time studying the violence of colonialism, slavery, exclusion, and inequality. Those histories are not distant. They continue to shape our world today. Contemporary politics often makes that continuity feel impossible to ignore. In fact, America’s 250th anniversary arrives at a moment when I find it increasingly difficult to feel uncomplicated pride in the nation itself.
It was perhaps for that reason that I found myself thinking less about the American Revolution than about this summer’s World Cup. At first, the connection seemed strange. Yet the tournament has become an unexpected reminder of something both Wheatley and Pearsall emphasize: communities rarely fit neatly within national boundaries.
That realization also changed the way I found myself watching the tournament. The same difficulty I found while writing this piece mirrors itself for me in the choice of whether or not I should root for the United States. Living in Britain only amplifies that hesitation. I often find myself questioning whether America, as it exists today, reflects the kind of country I would be proud to celebrate. Yet trying to find an alternative is not especially easy either. If I am unwilling to ignore America’s colonial history, it becomes difficult to overlook Britain’s. For the moment, I have somewhat jokingly settled on Scotland, helped along by family roots in the Scottish borderlands and a belief that its historical record is, at the very least, less catastrophic than those of its larger neighbors.
Despite those reservations, I’ve found watching the World Cup surprisingly heartening. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of this year’s tournament has been seeing supporters find joy in communities far from home. I’ve been following stories of seemingly unexpected American hospitality: Scots celebrating alongside Haitians in Boston, Algerian visitors finding welcome in small Midwestern towns, and the Bosnian national team training in St. Louis, home to the largest Bosnian population in the United States itself. Reflecting more critically on these moments, what struck me was not simply the hospitality itself, but the reminder that communities often transcend the political boundaries meant to contain them.
Those moments do not and cannot erase history. As happy as I am to see Haitian supporters finding community in Boston, I cannot help but think about the long history of American intervention in Haiti. As excited as I am to watch international fans experience the United States, I am also aware that many people around the world would likely be stopped and detained at our borders. The contradictions remain. Yet there is still something genuinely beautiful about these moments of connection.
Only then did I realize why the tournament had stayed with me. It reminded me of the communities I study as a historian.
In my work on Phillis Wheatley, Catharine Macaulay, Mercy Otis Warren, and other women writers of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, I have often argued that classical learning helped create communities that otherwise should not have existed. Women who were frequently denied educational opportunities nevertheless found ways to connect through shared intellectual interests. Macaulay and Warren exchanged letters and signed them using classical pseudonyms. Wheatley cultivated relationships that crossed oceans and connected her with readers, religious figures, and fellow writers throughout the Atlantic world. In societies structured by exclusion, these women built community.
Their world was hardly equitable, nor were their relationships and communities equal (Wheatley, for example, would not have been welcomed into the Bluestocking circle as Macaulay had been, nor the Otis family). Instead, their realities were shaped by empire, slavery, hierarchy, and profound inequalities. Yet within those constraints, they still found ways to create networks of mutual support, intellectual exchange, and belonging.
Perhaps that is one lesson worth carrying into America’s next 250 years.
When I think about what I actually love about America, I rarely think about the nation in the abstract. I think about the places and people that have made it feel like home. Watching World Cup supporters find a sense of belonging in Boston and St. Louis reminded me of my own hometown. I think about Cleveland.
I love Cleveland not because it is exceptional, but because it is ordinary, self-deprecating, and resilient in the best sense of those words. It is a place where people choose, day after day, to invest in one another. We rally around being a scrappy city of disappointing sports teams, unpredictable weather, and seemingly endless population decline. We are accustomed to being overlooked. Yet the people who stay find reasons to care deeply about the place because they have built communities there. We take the stereotypes, the shortcomings, and the imperfections and somehow still find joy in the city we call home.
I do not believe the answer is celebration for celebration’s sake. Nor do I think the answer is abandoning the possibility of community because the nation has failed to live up to its ideals. Wheatley’s work reminds us that accountability matters. Pearsall reminds us that national histories make more sense when placed within broader global contexts. Both encourage us to think critically about the stories we inherit. So too do they both remind us that people have always built communities that transcend the boundaries imposed upon them.
America remains profoundly imperfect, and Cleveland remains profoundly imperfect. They always have been. Yet there are still spaces of joy, inclusion, and belonging within them. Phillis Wheatley understood that communities could be forged across boundaries of race, gender, geography, and nation. Watching supporters from around the world come together during the World Cup, I find myself thinking about that lesson again. If the 250th anniversary offers an opportunity for anything, perhaps it is not simply to commemorate the nation, but to reflect on how we can continue that work ourselves. The challenge is not to ignore the past, but to confront it honestly while still creating spaces where people can belong.
I began this essay unsure how to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. I still don’t think the answer is celebration alone. But working toward those answers, together, seems to me a future worth celebrating.
