In 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before an audience in Rochester, New York, and posed a question that continues to echo through American history:

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

Douglass understood something that remains true today. National celebrations are rarely experienced the same way by everyone. The meaning of independence, freedom, citizenship, and belonging often depends upon where one stands in the American story.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, I find myself asking a similar question:

What, to America, is the 250th anniversary?

The answer depends, in part, on which parts of our history we choose to remember.

Many Americans will rightfully celebrate the founding of a nation that rejected monarchy and established a republic built upon the radical idea that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Drawing from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Montesquieu, and others, the founders embraced concepts of natural rights, popular sovereignty, and limited government that challenged centuries of political tradition. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution remain among the most influential political documents in human history, not because they perfected democracy, but because they provided a framework through which future generations could continue pursuing it.

Yet the story has never been that simple.

The founders created a government for their society, their moment, and their understanding of liberty. They fought for independence and established a framework that would outlive them. At the same time, many understood that the nation they were creating contained profound contradictions.

Thomas Jefferson famously described slavery as holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” He recognized what many of his generation understood but failed to resolve: a nation dedicated to liberty could not forever coexist with human bondage. Jefferson feared that slavery threatened the future of the republic itself. In this regard, his warning proved prophetic. The contest over slavery eventually tore the nation apart and led to the Civil War. The contradiction was not limited to slavery.

The same founding generation that spoke of liberty and natural rights also participated in the displacement of Native peoples. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered military campaigns against Native nations that called for the destruction of settlements, crops, and food supplies. The expansion of the United States would come at tremendous cost to Indigenous communities whose histories on this continent predated the republic by thousands of years.

These realities are not separate from the American story. They ARE the American story.

A nation founded upon extraordinary ideals and burdened by profound contradictions.

Too often, discussions about the nation’s founding become exercises in choosing between celebration and condemnation. Neither approach tells the full truth. The United States was born from revolutionary ideals while also carrying forward systems of exclusion, conquest, and inequality. The struggle between those realities has shaped nearly every generation since.

The Constitution itself reflects this tension.

The founders did not create a perfect government. They created a framework left open to interpretation and equipped with a functional amendment process through which future generations might make it, in the words of the Constitution, “more perfect.”

That process has never been easy.

It required a Civil War to end slavery.

It required Reconstruction to redefine citizenship.

It required constitutional amendments, court decisions, social movements, and generations of Americans willing to challenge the distance between the nation’s ideals and its realities.

For many Americans, these events are not ancient history.

The United States is preparing to celebrate 250 years of independence. Yet slavery existed in what became the United States for nearly 250 years itself. Reconstruction, the nation’s first attempt to create a multiracial democracy after slavery, lasted roughly 12 years, from 1865 to 1877. What followed was not a steady march toward equality, but nearly a century of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, racial violence, and legalized discrimination that persisted from the late nineteenth century into the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.

In other words, the period of American history in which Black Americans were legally segregated lasted far longer than the period in which the federal government seriously attempted to protect their rights after emancipation.

Many Americans alive today were born before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.

Two hundred and fifty years is both a long time and a remarkably short one.

This reality helps explain why debates surrounding history remain so contentious.

Consider Juneteenth.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. At its core, Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. It marks the expansion of the very ideals first articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

Yet in recent years, the recognition of Juneteenth and similar efforts to tell a more complete American story have increasingly been dismissed by some as examples of “DEI,” political indoctrination, or unnecessary division. This response raises an important question.

How can the story of freedom be considered divisive? How can acknowledging the end of slavery be viewed as separate from the American experience?

Juneteenth is not a departure from American history. It is one of its most significant chapters.

To understand Juneteenth is to understand the distance between the promises made in 1776 and the realities experienced by millions of Americans. To teach Juneteenth is not to diminish the founding. It is to understand the ongoing struggle to fulfill it. That struggle continues today.

Across the country, debates over history, race, education, voting rights, citizenship, and public memory reveal that Americans remain deeply divided over how the nation’s story should be told. Discussions about systemic inequality are often dismissed as divisive. Efforts to broaden historical understanding are frequently characterized as political agendas. Yet many of these responses echo familiar arguments from earlier periods of American history, moments when calls for greater inclusion, broader participation, or a fuller accounting of the past were met with resistance.

The details may change. The language may change. The struggle itself remains remarkably familiar.

The United States has never been defined solely by its achievements or solely by its failures. It has been defined by the ongoing tension between its ideals and its realities. Every generation inherits that tension. Every generation must decide whether to narrow or expand the meaning of liberty, citizenship, equality, and belonging.

That is why the 250th anniversary matters. The question before America is not whether the nation should celebrate. It should. The question is what exactly we are celebrating. Are we celebrating a founding moment frozen in time?

Or are we celebrating a continuing experiment in self-government, one that has been challenged, amended, expanded, and reimagined by generations of Americans who demanded that the nation live up to its own promises? The founders left us a nation unfinished.

They left behind aspirations that have inspired millions and contradictions that demanded correction. The story of the last 250 years is not simply the story of a nation founded. It is the story of a nation continually attempting to become.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, we should celebrate its achievements. We should celebrate the aspirations that gave birth to the republic. But we should also remember the people excluded from those aspirations, the generations who fought to expand them, and the truths that made those struggles necessary. Celebration without memory becomes mythology.

The founders did not create a perfect government. They created a framework left open to interpretation and equipped with an amendment process through which future generations might make it more perfect through struggle.

The work remains unfinished & perhaps that is the point.

Frederick Douglass was curious in 1852. Evermore am I in 2026.

What, to America, is the 250th anniversary?