America’s Big Birthdays

Every 50 years on the Declaration of Independence’s anniversary, the nation comes together to wrestle with the principles of its founding and what these ideas mean for us in the present. The messy politics, kitschy consumerism, strange spectacle, and scattered plethora of local commemorations all have antecedents in anniversaries past.

But underneath the supercharged rhetoric and questionable aesthetics, the narratives that Americans coalesce around have serious stakes for the country’s future. The essays in this exhibit offer glimpses of the semicentennial efforts to celebrate what Americans see as their nation’s strengths — and to prompt a reckoning with its lingering failures.