This past June, at a No Kings rally outside a white clapboard church in a little brick town in the lower right-hand corner of Vermont, Green Mountaineers huddled together in raincoats under a pearl-gray sky. Some ironic anti-royalists wore golden paper crowns from Burger King, but the more sartorially, not to say lepidopterously, dedicated came dressed as orange-and-black butterflies, these being the only monarchs allowed in America. “Rejecting Kings Since 1776” read a sign carried by a woman wearing a rainbow bucket hat. In the matter of handmade placards—Magic Marker on cardboard, duct-taped to wooden yardsticks—there was a certain amount of politico-literary one-upmanship. “Cry My Beloved Country” was clever, but was “Make Orwell Fiction Again” cleverer? Abraham Lincoln was there, grim-faced and sepia on a sign that read “Government of the People, by the People, for the People.” A red-white-and-blue printed poster quoted Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”: “In America, the Law Is King!”

With or without the No Kings movement, the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution is, inevitably, an occasion to ask what the Revolution meant, whether the people really do rule, and whether the law is still king. The jubilee began in earnest in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 2025—the anniversary of the shot heard round the world, marking the start of the war—with an early-morning battle reënactment, and very tasty cider doughnuts. It will reach its peak on July 4, 2026, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with fireworks all over the country, plus hot dogs and bicycle races and pompoms and drum majors. Between now and then, there will be exhibits and parades and lectures and picnics and protests and rallies and, one dearly hopes and prays, no more political violence, no more blood on the streets, no more shots fired. But, in a year that has already seen multiple political assassinations, the deployment of the National Guard to American cities, and masked agents of the federal government hauling people off the streets and into unmarked vans, the prospects for a peaceful anniversary appear remote. A revolutionary year seems far likelier, and, politically, that could go either way. Whatever you believe about the state of the Union, you might want to be careful what you wish for.

As for history—and the story told about the American Revolution in museums and classrooms, on walking tours, and, inescapably, once the marketing kicks in, on cereal boxes and highway billboards and cans of soda—the Trump Administration has its version, and it wants that version to be everyone’s version. But the problems with the federal government’s interest in controlling the story of the American Revolution began long before Donald Trump was reëlected. The U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan body orchestrating the celebration, better known as America250, or A250, was established in 2016 during Barack Obama’s last year in office. Almost immediately, it descended into internecine war, and, in the near-decade since, its dysfunction has greatly impeded the ability of the rest of the country to get any planning done. This is measurable. Near the end of the Biden Administration, A250 contracted with iCivics, a civics-education organization founded by Sandra Day O’Connor, to research activities planned around the country. These turned out to be very difficult even to discover since, as the iCivics C.E.O. told me, “People are very underfunded and just really didn’t have anything together by that point.” That’s still true.

This summer, the partnerships that A250 had with several respected institutions—including iCivics, the Bill of Rights Institute, the National Cathedral, More Perfect, and the American Association for State and Local History—quietly ended. The commission, which is congressional, has struggled to maintain even a semblance of independence from the White House. In September, Ariel Abergel, a twenty-five-year-old former Fox News producer who had been appointed by Trump to preside over the commission, posted on A250’s official Instagram account, “America is in mourning. God bless Charlie Kirk.” Days later, the commission fired him, citing “serious and repeated breaches of authority and trust.” Then came the government shutdown, which closed the doors of both the National Archives, postponing the October opening of its exhibit on “The American Story,” and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, likely delaying the début of its “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness” exhibit, slated for March. And both institutions, like every other museum with any relationship to the federal government, have been in the stranglehold of imperious demands from the White House; do-as-we-say pressure from state governments is becoming increasingly common, too.

There’s no shortage of reasons that the celebration of the American Revolution has been, at least thus far, so half-assed. A lot of places began their planning for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth in 2020, in the aftermath of the 1619 Project (itself marking an anniversary) and during the George Floyd moment; their plans therefore tilted in the direction of racial justice. But, after Trump’s victory in 2024, they were told they needed to tilt the other way. An early executive order denounced “the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” abroad in the land and called for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” under which the Administration has sought to dictate what the American story is, and who can tell it. Much federal funding now requires celebrating American greatness, military valor, and exceptionalism. In response, some local, state, and national organizations have simply refused to apply for it. John Dichtl, the head of the American Association for State and Local History, told me that people have said to him, “The money is tainted, and I can’t take it no matter what.” Others have fought back. After DOGE ended all National Endowment for the Humanities grants to state humanities councils in April, Oregon Humanities, joined by the Federation of State Humanities Councils, sued the federal government, arguing that the funds had been unlawfully revoked. The Oregon council is using its reduced N.E.H. money to hold a series of community conversations, especially in rural public libraries, trying to build bridges across the national political divide, under the heading “Beyond 250.” That’s one of the better stories. Another is the work of the Bill of Rights Institute, which has partnered with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation to hold civics bees in schools all over the country. “Whether you’re a sixth grader or an eighth grader, when you’re grounded in the documents and you’re getting to the ‘why’ questions and you’re going deep about what it would mean to put these principles into practice, something profound can come of that,” David Bobb, the institute’s defiantly optimistic president, told me. But even Bobb admits the scale of the problem: civics teachers are afraid to teach civics, concerned about the government or about parents, or both. “Teachers feel very, very worried. We see it all the time. It’s hard for them to go there, to the contentious topics that they want to talk about and know they need to talk about.” This is America at two-five-oh.

Under the threat of censorship and other forms of menace (the Trump Administration this year has so far fired the Archivist of the United States and the Librarian of Congress and has tried very hard to get the Smithsonian Institution to do its curatorial bidding), some organizations have decided to do nothing at all, as if they could simply pretend that the nation was not about to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its birth. “People are terrified,” one art-museum curator told me, not only about what to exhibit but about what to write on labels. She says she keeps asking herself, “Should I just put the stuff on the wall and say, ‘This was made in this period?’ ” Others are opting to un-celebrate and, instead, to denigrate the anniversary, following the logic of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s original introduction to the 1619 Project, which cast the Revolution as regrettable. “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Hannah-Jones had written, a claim to which some prominent historians publicly objected, leading the Times to issue a partial correction (“some of the colonists”). One group of historians, for instance, is planning a panel discussion at an academic conference on whether it would be better to “smear” the Revolution than to commemorate it.

Even those cultural organizations, from historic houses to public-school districts and universities, that have decided to do something for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth appear to be doing considerably less than they did for the two-hundredth. For the bicentennial, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a nearly seven-thousand-square-foot blockbuster exhibit on Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; critics may have found it tacky, but it became a hugely successful travelling show. For 2026, the Met is planning to display, in the American Wing, thirty-two works from its own collection; one colleague of mine referred to putting on this exhibit as effectively “staging a die-in.” A frustrated curator told me that this modest scale is all the Met can do because “Look at the moment we’re in.”

Another option is to try to capture this moment. The New York Public Library’s bicentennial exhibit, “The American Idea,” displayed the Bay Psalm Book, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, but for next year the library is planning to ask visitors to reflect on the meaning of the anniversary, and to archive their answers. In the nineteen-seventies, National Public Radio, with generous funding from the N.E.H., staged a yearlong series of three-hour Saturday-morning call-in programs called the “American Issues Radio Forum.” Given that the Trump Administration has gutted the N.E.H., defunded NPR, and shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it’s difficult to see how public media can mount anything as ambitious as was achieved a half century ago. A spokesman for NPR told me that its two-hundred-and-fiftieth agenda is “still in the planning phase.”

A year, these days, is a lifetime. In 2024, the Declaration House in Philadelphia—a bicentennial-era reconstruction of the building where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence—installed “The Descendants of Monticello,” a hauntingly beautiful and provocative work by the artist Sonya Clark. Clark placed large video monitors behind the building’s windows, turned outward toward the street, so that passersby were met by the filmed and photographed eyes of the descendants of the people Jefferson enslaved, including his own descendants by way of Sally Hemings. Declaration House is part of Independence National Historical Park; under the new regime, no Park Service site will be allowed to display any exhibit that does the essential work of scrutinizing the relationship between liberty and slavery in American history, or the relationship between Native nations and the federal government, because to do so is now considered advancing a “corrosive ideology.” The President’s House Site, built atop the foundations of the mansion where George Washington resided while in Philadelphia, has been asked to review panels describing the lives of nine people who lived there as Washington’s property, owing to the Administration’s requirement that any displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” be removed. Under this logic, to note that Washington owned slaves is to disparage him but to pretend that those nine people never existed comes at no cost to their memory. (Online, citizens have been archiving signs slated for destruction under the hashtag #SaveOurSigns.)

The hurdles facing museums and other institutions make it particularly impressive that many have already launched or are about to launch remarkably thoughtful two-hundred-and-fiftieth exhibits and activities. This month, History Colorado will open an N.E.H.-funded exhibit called “Moments That Made US,” featuring artifacts that mark turning points in American history, including Nixon’s tape recorder, the inkwell that Grant and Lee used to sign the surrender at Appomattox, one of the first copies of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo printed in Mexico, and some moon rocks brought to Earth on Apollo 11 in 1969. Jason Hanson, History Colorado’s effervescent chief creative officer, told me that he thinks of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to talk about what it means to be an American and what we want it to be going forward.” He also thinks that it’s easier to be sunny about the two-hundred-and-fiftieth outside the original thirteen colonies, which he calls the “OG13.” “We are ready for an American history that doesn’t always say, ‘The meaning of this event is this,’ ” Hanson told me. “We are having an argument in the country about the meaning of events.” He’s up for it. He’s likewise excited about the state’s plan to commemorate the nation’s birthday, which is also Colorado’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, by organizing teams to climb the state’s fourteeners, mountains taller than fourteen thousand feet. (Climbing mountains turns out to be wonderfully semiquincentennial. “Climb the Mountain, Discover America” is the slogan for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth used by Monticello, Jefferson’s mountaintop home, which will be unveiling a new center for history and citizenship.)

Back on the edge of the Atlantic, another early stunner is “The Declaration’s Journey,” which opened on October 18th at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution and traces the travels of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence across centuries and continents. “We tell the story of the Revolution all the time,” the exhibit’s curator, Philip Mead, told me. (Mead is a former doctoral student of mine, and I should be clear that I’ve got about as much distance from this topic as a letter has from an envelope.) He said, “You know what they say about stories? There are two plots. A stranger comes to town, or a man goes on a trip. We’re telling those two stories here. The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.” The exhibit opens, by way of prologue, with two borrowed artifacts: the wooden Windsor chair in which Jefferson is believed to have written the Declaration, on loan from the American Philosophical Society, and a rusted metal prison bench, on loan from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, from which Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.

My informal survey suggests that the Eastern Seaboard states are by far the most stressed out about the coming anniversary. Compared with the OG13, the rest of the country is chill. Kansas City is getting ready for about six hundred and fifty thousand visitors at World Cup games next summer; on the Fourth of July, the city’s National WWI Museum and Memorial will light its two-hundred-and-seventeen-foot Liberty Memorial Tower after a Stars and Stripes picnic. Arizona is planning a travelling museum that will bring the state’s most treasured historical artifacts to all fifteen of its counties, setting them up in parks, schools, libraries, and civic centers. Its A250 commission, on which the Tohono O’odham Nation leader, Verlon Jose, serves as the vice chair, is also using the occasion to tell the story of Indigenous peoples and the West, and to celebrate Arizona’s outdoors, including birding and fishing. “We have Operation Freedom March, a veterans-and-military-member relay along the Arizona Trail,” the executive director of the commission told me. “It runs from Mexico to Utah. People sign up to do it over the course of the year. You can walk, bike, run, horseback-ride.”

Cartoon by Dabin Han

Sweating your way up and down a mountain, as opposed to, say, pondering General John Burgoyne’s underestimation of the strength of the American forces in the Battle of Saratoga, seems an excellent way to mark the two-hundred-and-fiftieth, not least because, as Caroline Klibanoff, the head of an organization called Made By Us, told me, “Gen Z does not care about this moment.” She’s leading a charge to “youthify” everything that’s going on, finding a way to involve young people in the planning of what she calls Youth250, and to use the anniversary to talk not about the past two hundred and fifty years but the next.

“Make this about the future rather than the past” is also the advice given by Sarah Jencks, a consultant who works with organizations all over the country, trying to help them figure out what to do for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth. The idea here, it seems, is to look to the future because the past is polarizing and the present is worse.

Amid this American crisis arrives Ken Burns’s six-part, twelve-hour PBS documentary, “The American Revolution,” funded in part by the now defunct C.P.B. The series, which is directed by Burns and his longtime collaborators Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt and written by Geoffrey C. Ward, has much of the majestic scale, mournful tone, and sombre feel of Burns’s breakout eleven-and-a-half-hour “Civil War” series, from 1990, which both secured him a well-earned reputation as the nation’s foremost documentary-film historian and established a style in the representation of the past on television that has been so widely (and very often poorly) imitated that it has become at once inescapable and exhausted. What’s so astonishing about “The American Revolution” is how it deploys what has long been called the “Ken Burns effect” to an altogether sharper end, something you can see in his deeply serious 2017 series “The Vietnam War,” directed with Lynn Novick, which was something less gauzy than “The Civil War,” something as pointed as a bayonet. The new series is the best film out of Burns’s shop and, I suspect, the hardest to make.

What makes “The American Revolution” so singular and unfamiliar is neither its writing—Ward wrote for the Civil War and Vietnam War films, too—nor its style. It features fiddly, moody eighteenth-century-style music and pitch-perfect actors reading pithy, moving excerpts from eighteenth-century letters: Mandy Patinkin as Benjamin Franklin, David Oyelowo as Olaudah Equiano, Claire Danes as Abigail Adams. In place of the Mathew Brady photographs of “The Civil War,” “The American Revolution” lingers over eighteenth-century oil-on-canvas portraits and more than a thousand still images housed in archives, libraries, and museums (many of which, presumably, may not be on display in 2026 because of funding cuts and government censorship). The film’s familiar visual vocabulary consists of slow pans over these images, alternating with more than a hundred animated maps of battlefields, loving and exquisite footage of American landscapes—stone walls, cornfields, campfires—and scenes of anonymous reënactors marching and loading muskets and firing cannons, riding on horseback by moonlight, spinning and carding wool in pine-floored rooms, washing and wringing clothes by riverbanks. There are a lot of muddy boots and many guttering candles.

Instead, what distinguishes “The American Revolution” is its fidelity to the best and most sophisticated scholarship—searing, challenging, and explosively interesting, especially as intellectual history. The Trump Administration won’t “restore truth and sanity to American history.” But this film does. (Burns, who seldom takes political positions publicly, has spoken out against Trump since 2016, when he said that Trump belongs to a type that “emerges everywhere and in all eras.”) Especially in his earlier films, Burns deferred to the storytelling of popular historians, with mixed results. David McCullough narrated “The Civil War,” which chiefly featured Shelby Foote, and the most memorable talking head in “Baseball” (1994) was Doris Kearns Goodwin. Much academic history suffers from pedantry and an almost willful irrelevance, but much popular history fails to tell you anything new or to ask you to confront anything difficult or unsettling (or, in Trumpspeak, anything “inappropriately disparaging”). “The American Revolution” relies on some terrific popular historians, including the journalist Rick Atkinson, who helpfully explains battle after battle. But Burns and his colleagues far more often rely on scholars, including Friederike Baer, Ned Blackhawk, Christopher L. Brown, Kathleen DuVal, and Alan Taylor, who appear onscreen not to recount what happened, or not only that, but to explain what it means. They are fierce.

“What the American Revolution gave the United States was an actual idea of a moment of origin, which many other countries in the world don’t have,” Maya Jasanoff says in the documentary. The consequence, she continues, is that Americans have “invested these particular years of these particular people with a set of stakes that are so far beyond what any set of events and any set of people can plausibly carry.” (Jasanoff, like four more of the film’s chief storytellers—Vincent Brown, Philip Deloria, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Jane Kamensky—is a friend and colleague of mine. Letter, envelope.) “If one wants a national origin story that’s clean and neat and tells you very clearly who the good guys are and who the bad guys are,” Vincent Brown says, the American Revolution is not that story.

The story that “The American Revolution” tells is of the emergence of the most important ideas of the modern world, fought over in a bloody and courageous rebellion against tyranny which was at once a civil war and a global war whose notions of freedom and slavery and conquest and independence tangled together the fates of British soldiers and American militiamen, Lenape diplomats and Seneca warriors, German mercenaries and French sailors, Akan men and Igbo women, backwoods pioneers and city ladies, the free and the unfree, the rich and the poor. It’s a canvas, part Bruegel, part Goya, a political carrousel, a teeming, moving, terrifying story, relating a chain of events forged of bravery and betrayal, of ferocity and torment, of ambition and terror, and yet a chain held together by the single organizing idea, as Kamensky points out, of possibility, of a sense of living on the edge of a knife: “Everybody on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.” Throughout history, humans had been ruled by tyrants and armies, without their consent. Americans fought for the freedom to rule themselves, and, more miraculously still, they won. Even after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, King George III told Parliament that he remained determined “to restore to my deluded subjects in America that happy and prosperous condition which they formerly derived from a due obedience to the laws.” Parliament, though, voted to give up on America. As the wryly smiling Stephen Conway, a distinguished British military historian, observes in the PBS series’ stirring final episode, “The American Revolution changed the world.”

The series’ achievement lies in honoring the dignity and meaning of the founding’s revolutionary ideals, and the sacrifices of all who fought for them, while taking an unsparing look at the war’s cruelties and costs, especially for women, Black Americans, and Native nations denied the equality, liberty, and sovereignty the Revolution promised. The Revolution that failed is the Revolution the Trump Administration cannot bear for Americans to know and mourn. The Revolution that succeeded is the one some American institutions are determined to ignore.

And maybe this is a balm, or false comfort, but “The American Revolution” is also a reminder that this very division was a feature of the eighteenth century, too, when there seemed, to many observers, to be so many different kinds of Americans that it was exceedingly difficult to believe they could ever constitute a people. No army in history seemed ever to have been more ragged and motley and mongrel and polyglot than the Continental, rich and poor, learned and illiterate, from boys to old men, skilled and unskilled, born all over the world, speaking dozens of languages, believing in different gods and in no god. It beggared belief that they could fight as one, and for no more than an idea. As a Hessian officer asked in his diary at the close of the war, “Who would have thought a hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble would arise a people who could defy kings?”

A tragedy of this year, if, admittedly, a small one relative to what else is going wrong in the United States, is that the two-hundred-and-fiftieth will be a missed opportunity to wrestle with the meaning of the American Revolution and of the principles on which the nation was founded at a time when debating those ideas and confronting their implications are desperately needed. For better or worse, the No Kings movement, and the opposition to it, is where that debate is now happening. Revolutionary reënactment as political theatre is scarcely new. Americans have been dressing up in three-cornered hats and knee breeches almost since the War for Independence ended, insisting that they, and not their political opponents, are the heirs of the Revolution. This has been true of the left, from suffragists to civil-rights activists, and of the right, down to the Tea Party that began during Obama’s first term, protesting both the bank bailouts and the Affordable Care Act. That’s what happens when a nation’s founding document makes universal claims about self-evident truths and inalienable rights: anyone can use those claims, and arguing over them is how American politics works. But the Declaration was also a secessionist document, establishing revolution as a right. Nations born in revolution frequently die in revolution. The United States is, in this case, very much an exception for having lasted as long as it has. That founding moment and this long history—what historians like to call the “unfinished revolution”—requires examination and argument, at least every fifty years or so. Are the people still their own rulers? Is the law still king?

Last month, as many as seven million Americans gathered for another day of No Kings protests, or what congressional Republicans took to calling “Hate America rallies.” On Truth Social, the President posted an A.I.-generated video of himself—wearing a gold crown and an Air Force jumpsuit—in a fighter jet emblazoned with “KING TRUMP” on the side, flying over a generic downtown and dumping a payload of excrement onto No Kings protesters.

I went back to that city in the lower-right corner of Vermont. A man wearing a green hat carried a cardboard sign that read “Maple Syrup Makers for Sanity.” Django Grace, a college sophomore in a blue oxford shirt, spoke from a wooden gazebo, calling for common ground and common sense. I hadn’t made a sign; I was there to report. But, if I had, I’d have quoted not “Common Sense” but Paine’s lesser-known 1776 pamphlet, “The American Crisis.” After the war had begun, Paine, a volunteer in the Continental Army, indicted loyalists who continued to pledge themselves to King George. “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it,” Paine wrote, “but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.” If it’d fit, I’d wear it on a hat, except that I have a better hat. I got it at the Minnesota History Center, in St. Paul, twenty years ago, before all hell broke loose in this country. It’s black and a little threadbare, with a fraying brim, and it says “HISTORY MATTERS.” ♦