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A Chapter of: Miles to Go: Stories of Us at 250

Foreword: America, A Work in Progress

What America鈥檚 250th can鈥攁nd cannot鈥攖ell us about the American experiment.

For much of my career, America鈥檚 250th felt like a fixture of the imagined future鈥攕omewhere between hoverboards and constitutional amendments. The crucial difference was that the semiquincentennial was a calendrical reality, one that almost no one outside my professional world seemed to care about.

That national indifference persisted as the future arrived in increasingly surreal installments: the first Black president, a reality television star who incited an insurrection during a global pandemic, the first woman vice president, and on and on.

For better or worse, the commander in chief is also the historian in chief. As the semiquincentennial drew nearer and the country lurched from one unprecedented moment to the next, I began fretting over the same question: Who would preside over America鈥檚 big birthday?

Just as I was beginning to despair, 麻豆果冻传媒 announced the first year of its Us@250 Fellowship. I somehow managed to come along for all three, and the work of my fellow fellows鈥攔epresented here by the second cohort鈥攂ecame a talisman.

In the essays that follow, the authors explore 鲍蝉蔼250鈥檚 three themes: pride in the nation鈥檚 founding and progress, reckoning with its failures, and shared aspirations for a shared future. Each drops the reader into a specific place, at a specific moment, confronting a specific civic problem: a Nebraska town where teenagers work the graveyard shift to keep their families afloat; a New Orleans courtyard where young DJs interview adults about what it means to be 鈥渓oud鈥; a New Jersey suburb trying to turn slogans about integration into actual friendships; Atlanta鈥檚 suburbs, where demography is outpacing political imagination; the West Side of Chicago, where a closed school becomes a test case for what a neighborhood will tolerate and what it refuses to accept; Washington, DC, on the eve of the bicentennial, when home rule was both an abstraction and a demand; a former concentration camp on the Colorado plains where survivors spent decades simply asking to be remembered.

Individually, these are features, dispatches, and essays. Taken together, they insist that America at 250 cannot be understood from a podium or a capital, nor represented by any single person. The writers go where the work is being done and let the people doing it set the terms: a sixth grader in New Orleans selling hand-thrown ceramics; a Black couple in Forsyth County opening a bakery in a place that once drove out every Black resident; a school district in New Jersey trying, and sometimes failing, to make good on a decades-old promise of integration; Japanese American families who spent their childhoods behind barbed wire pressing a tiny Colorado town to acknowledge that the camp at its edge was a prison, not a 鈥渞elocation center.鈥

Aspiration is thankfully everywhere. It is in the Quality of Life Plan drawn up by Austin Coming Together on Chicago鈥檚 West Side, in DC鈥檚 Bicentennial Assembly voting to make home rule its first priority, and in a Nebraska teacher who quietly lets a student sleep through part of class because she knows he has been in a factory all night and believes his future is worth the accommodation.

As the semiquincentennial arrives wrapped in the usual July 4th vagueness, these essays refuse it. They name names鈥攚ho redlined and who resisted, who closed the schools and who campaigned to reopen them as something else, who built coalitions and who tried to break them. They also name the people who do the unglamorous work of democratic maintenance: the assistant principal who keeps correcting outsiders鈥 assumptions about her students, the pastor who connects an after-school program with a parenting class across town, the history teacher who abandons the textbook for a living history project that outlasts his own career.

A tidy, cathartic semiquincentennial isn鈥檛 going to happen鈥攁nd wouldn鈥檛, no matter who was president. An individual or single group, however well intentioned, simply can鈥檛 deliver the kind of national reckoning I once fantasized about. What this collection offers instead is something smaller, harder, and ultimately more useful: people in very different places, facing very different constraints, insisting that their communities are capable of more than they have been offered and acting accordingly.

For a long time, I thought America鈥檚 250th might reveal what this great experiment had amounted to, but these essays suggest a more useful possibility: that the answer depends on what we do next.

A collage of four images: an elderly woman in a fur coat sitting outdoors, a young man running in a baseball uniform, a young man listening attentively in class, and an older man in a cowboy hat seated at a table.
Miles to Go: Stories of Us at 250

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Foreword: America, A Work in Progress

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