When Americans celebrate their history, controversy frequently ensues. Public commemorations, particularly those that take place on a national scale, require difficult choices about how the country understands its origins and what those interpretations mean for the present.

Throughout 2026, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Fault lines have already emerged over what will be showcased and what will be left out. With his “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, Donald Trump has sent clear signals to museums, universities, and civic groups as they determine what to present in the coming months.

His directives have included an attempt to purge the findings of decades of archive-based, peer-reviewed scholarship from presentations that reach the public. Professional historians have expressed deep concern that the administration, working with Republican allies in Congress, is attempting to impose a nationalist narrative that erases difficult issues, conflicts, and failures from the national conversation.

This is not the first time that this kind of historic celebration has generated controversy. Fifty years ago, Americans debated the bicentennial, and the way history would be presented was widely seen as a test of what the country had learned from the political struggles of the 1960s.

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In 1976, the United States was reeling from a tumultuous period. Deep divisions had opened over race and gender relations, sexuality, cultural values, and the war in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon’s downfall, and the scandals that surrounded Watergate, had generated profound distrust of government. The energy crisis shattered faith in U.S. power, while stagflation—the combination of inflation and unemployment—left millions of working Americans struggling to get by. President Gerald Ford, who entered the White House in August 1974 amid public optimism that he could heal the nation, saw that confidence erode dramatically after he pardoned Nixon for any crimes that he might have committed.

The bicentennial offered a chance, at least in theory, to bring the country together. Preparations stretched over nearly a decade. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress established the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC) to develop a national plan. Over the following seven years, the commission became mired in internal divisions, especially as domestic conflict over Vietnam deepened. After Nixon was elected in 1968, growing numbers of Americans lost confidence that ARBC could produce ideas free from the administration’s political agenda. As a result, the commission was disbanded in 1973 and replaced with the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA). The People’s Bicentennial Commission, an alternative project that included a former steelworker and Baptist minister, believed that under Nixon the commission had been manipulated for his own glorification. “The rising crescendo of nationwide festivities to culminate on July 4, 1976,” noted one member, “is to be the jewel in the diadem of the Nixon years.”

Under the leadership of Secretary of the Navy John Warner, the ARBA shifted course. Instead of emphasizing centralized, national events, it embraced localism. The federal government, in partnership with private foundations, provided support to local governments and civic groups, enabling them to design commemorations tailored to their own communities. Although a series of high-profile national events remained part of the plan, the “Bicentennial Communities” agenda emphasized flexibility and diversity in both form and content.

The programs began as soon as the new year arrived. On New Year’s Eve, thousands of Philadelphians gathered to watch government workers move the Liberty Bell from its perch in Independence Hall, where it had sat for almost 223 years, to a new public pavilion on Independence Mall. The American Freedom Train launched a traveling exhibition, embarking on a 25,000-mile tour through the 48 contiguous states. Enthusiastic communities greeted the train with fireworks and parades.

The culminating moment came on the Fourth of July. Fireworks lit up the skylines of major cities across the country. In New York, Operation Sail—a parade of tall ships, including those from 13 other countries, filled the Hudson River. Television reporter Gabe Pressman said of the event, “Call it patriotism, call it a rebirth of pride, call it whatever you will, but if you mingled with the crowds … you might have felt what we did, a great sense of joy and well-being, for the first time in many years, New Yorkers of all ages and backgrounds, out in force, celebrating together.”

Back in Philadelphia, Ford delivered a well-received speech in Independence Hall where he said, “From this small but beautiful building, then the most imposing structure in the colonies, came the two great documents that continue to supply the moral and intellectual power for the American adventure in self-government.” An estimated 500,000 people lined the streets and sidewalks of the nation’s capital to watch the grandest parade of all, with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the country singer Johnny Cash leading the parade up Constitution Avenue. The People’s Bicentennial Commission held a competing event, with prominent figures from the left, such as the actress Jane Fonda (whom conservatives had dubbed “Hanoi Jane” because of her visit to North Vietnam in 1972).

In tens of thousands of communities, small town streets were filled with picnics, concerts, and parades. Some towns assembled time capsules to be opened decades later. School administrators and teachers wove the nation’s founding into their curricula. New museums also opened to mark the occasion, including the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Valley Forge park in Pennsylvania. At Disneyland and Disney World, visitors lined up daily to watch “America on Parade,” which featured floats carrying cartoon characters draped in red, white, and blue: Mickey Mouse held a U.S. flag as Goofy played a drum; beside him, Donald Duck held a fife. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band thrilled fans at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park with an unannounced concert.

The localistic structure of the festivities created opportunities for groups that might otherwise have been excluded to participate in the year’s events and to showcase the nation’s diversity. In Washington, for example, the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation received funding from the National Park Service to set up a series of landmarks highlighting Black history, while the National Organization for Women commemorated the Boston Tea Party, linking it to the struggle for women’s rights. A group of Native Americans traveled in the Trail of Self-Determination Caravan from the West Coast to Washington to remind the nation of the Indigenous peoples who suffered after European settlers arrived.

The year’s events generated considerable criticism, even after the second national commission managed to move beyond the fractures of its predecessor. A number of critics objected to the extent to which companies were trying to profit from the bicentennial through commercialized celebrations. According to Time magazine, “Like a sudden swarm of 200-year locusts, commemorative kitsch is appearing everywhere: plates, mugs and glasses decaled with an eagle or the likeness of George Washington or John Adams or the flag or Archibald Willard’s familiar Revolutionary fife-and-drum trio. Businessmen are offering patriotic yo-yos, ties, music boxes, telephones, costumes, clocks, T shirts and egg timers.” At McDonald’s, customers could enjoy “red, white, and blue shakes.” A Coca Cola ad showed historic reenactors and parade viewers drinking the soda. Budweiser’s spot extolled U.S. traditions—including the way the company brewed its beer.

Despite the commission’s success at broadening the kinds of subject matter on display, there were still numerous critics who felt that the commemorations excluded them and glossed over the nation’s more troubling history. Local public displays, for instance, did not satisfy Black activists who felt that the celebration didn’t reckon with how and why so many people in their communities still lived with poverty, police repression, and structural inequality. The director of the Community News Service, an organization of minority journalists in New York, said in the New York Times, “What is there to celebrate? … We hear people say: ‘All right so I go out and celebrate over the weekend, but I’ve got to get back and do some very heavy things on Tuesday morning to stay alive.” Robert Burnette, the tribal chairman of the Rosebud Sioux, told a reporter, “Indians are already too patriotic. … Look at all those words,” he said of the Declaration of Independence. “Justice, justice, justice, justice. We’ve never had any of that justice—and now you people want to celebrate!” TheNational Lampoon, a popular satirical magazine, published the “Bicentennial Calendar,” featuring a chronology of massacres, corruption, wars, and disasters; its cover was a drawing of Mount Rushmore, with a bullet hole in Abraham Lincoln’s forehead.

Given the widespread distrust of government that followed the devastation of Vietnam (which one year earlier had fallen to communism despite all the Americans who lost their lives in the war), as well as the utter corruption of the Nixon presidency, many Americans viewed the bicentennial as a cynical ploy to erase the conflicts of the past decade.

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In the coming year, the challenges facing the 250th are even greater than those Americans confronted in 1976. Beyond the inevitable disagreements over how to interpret and present the nation’s past and how to connect that history to the present, government officials are exerting a far heavier hand in shaping the national debate. Whereas the primary concern in 1976 was that federal, state, and local officials might emphasize some aspects of history while ignoring others, today the presidential administration is using federal dollars as leverage to push certain issues off the agenda. These efforts have extended into the classroom as well, with some state governors intervening aggressively in the realm of history education.

Talking about the nation’s past is always contentious. It is inevitable, and healthy, that robust civic debates will arise over history and its implications. What makes the current moment so fraught is that politicians, including the president, are attempting to steer the commemoration in specific directions that reflect a particular political agenda rather than the historical record itself. As the former president of the Organization of American Historians, David Blight, recently warned fellow historians: “If we are not vigilant and mobilized soon, this debate and much else we do in the historian’s craft could become sawdust in the Trump administration’s wood chippers or simply restrained into silence and fear by the slow destruction of universities and public schools . . . When barbarians reach our gates, near our most precious libraries, museums, sacred historical sites, and even our classrooms, we can contemplate discussion, although we know it will not work. We surely cannot let them in, even as they hold swords and financial ruin over our heads.”

As a result, the choices made by state and local officials, museum curators, scholars, teachers, and those charged with preserving national spaces in response to political pressure will be critical. The 250th will serve as a test of how much freedom Americans retain to study and debate their own history—the good, the bad, and everything in between—and whether we are entering an era in which the heavy hand of government dictates how the past is understood.