The New Yorker Radio Hour - The History Wars and America at 250, with the Historian Jill Lepore

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence arrives during intense disputes about American history, as the Trump Administration demands a more glorifying view of the nation’s past at federally run historical sites and in federally funded projects. The staff writer Jill Lepore (who won the Pulitzer Prize in History this month for her book “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution”) guest-hosts a special episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour about this fraught moment, reflecting on the responsibility of academic historians to shape the public debate. She compares our moment with the bicentennial—which fell in the wake of the Vietnam War and the scandals of Richard Nixon’s Presidency—in a conversation with the Yale historian Beverly Gage. Lepore looks at the nature of the country’s war over history with Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. They discuss the Donald Trump-approved “Freedom 250” projection on the Washington Monument, and talk about how Americans can meaningfully participate in the semiquincentennial. If “we’re sitting around waiting for the occupant of the White House to tell us what American history means,” Lepore says, “you just kind of want to walk into traffic.”  Further reading:  America at 250, a special issue of The New Yorker “Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits?,” by Jill Lepore “Scandal, Protest, Goofiness, and Grandeur at the U.S. Bicentennial,” by Jill Lepore “Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Complicated Commemorations,” by Jelani Cobb “This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History,” by Beverly Gage   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Guess what? The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is nearly upon us. And to think about this occasion, and what it means, I've asked Jill Leport to join us. Jill's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for many years. In just this month, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, We the People, a history of the U.S. Constitution. Jillipur is a professor of history and law at Harvard University,

and she's our host for today's program. Way back in the 1930s, in the dark days of the Great Depression, with democracy on the rocks, the U.S. government hired more than 6,000 out-of-work writers for something called the Federal Writers Project. They brought on all kinds of writers, from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of a living by writing

and couldn't anymore. Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Zorneal Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright, they all got involved. Studs Terkel, too. He got his start at the Federal Writers Project. The government sent those writers out all over the country, to talk to people,

to listen to people, to chronicle American life. the project's folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, said he wanted to turn the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature. The idea that documenting ordinary lives was important was part of how Americans in the 1930s saved democracy at home. So this year, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, I got really interested in what a project like that might find out today.

We're going to hear that later. But I've also been really curious about what Americans thought about the state of the country 50 years ago, the bicentennial. Revolution, that's what it means. Well, it's just a celebration of 200 years. Lots of work. I came across this film deep in the National Archives.

It's called The Birthday Party. It was commissioned by the National Park Service, which hired a documentary filmmaker named Joe Giova. to make a little film Vox Pop style, man on the street, federal writers project style. Reporters went all over the country to ask Americans what the nation's 200th birthday meant to them. It's a big celebration. It's like a great big birthday.

I'm glad it's happening. I'm really excited about it. I don't see a great orgy of celebration. Right now we don't have a great deal to celebrate. I feel that it might leave a lot of people out. I'm just thankful to be here, be a part of the Centennial. This film somehow got lost. I don't know if anyone ever even watched it, but I've watched it like 50 times. I love this stuff.

I would eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's a message in a bottle. There are middle-aged men wearing pork pie hats, smoking pipes, women with long straight hair parted in the middle, young guys with really, really long hair and beard, or afros, there are bell bottoms and beads. And the thing is, America at 250 seems now to a lot of people, to me anyway, it seems like a mess. In a piece I wrote for the magazine this winter, I called the 250th a goat rodeo, and I stand by that.

But the bicentennial had kind of the same vibe. A lot of the people you can hear in this birthday party film and not just the countercultural types, They just weren't too head up about America at 200. For me, it doesn't have any real significant meaning. I mean, what's the difference between 199 years or 201 years? In many ways, the bicentennial is just being fabricated. At the time of the bicentennial, we still have 8% unemployment. I can't see any reason to go around patting ourselves in the back

for having just survived two centuries. We have a long way to go, maybe as Gully Jean King might have paraphrased it. So what do you hear there? I hear a couple of things. One is a critique that was made about the bicentennial, which is that it had become commercialized. And I think also a deep sense of kind of uncertainty

about how you're supposed to act in a moment like that. Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale. In researching her new book, This Land is Your Land, Gage went out on the road a few years ago, trying to figure out how this country tells the story of its own past. I really wanted to talk to her about this bicentennial film. So is, like any birthday or big marker, is it just a sort of fake occasion? And also, how do you relate to a country that I actually think it's kind of remarkable that it lasted 200 and then 250 years.

So I would not agree with the commenter who was saying, what's the big deal? But nonetheless, how to relate to and maybe even celebrate a country about which you feel profoundly ambivalent. To buy a centennial, I think it could be a very profitable thing for business here in Washington. Well, it's a bad time, I think, to have it. So I really don't know what we have to gain by it.

Well, after Watergate, the morale of the country's low, maybe if we could inject some national spirit back into the country and would do a lot of going. I loved the comment that the bicentennial was coming at a really inconvenient time. It's a bad time. We ought to reschedule, which I think a lot of people feel about 2026, too. I think that woman was basically my aunt, you know. You know, the other thing that strikes me is that there are not more. convenient moments in history. And one of the things that you can see reflected in that clip is how persistent the anxiety that the country is in decline, that it's flying apart, that you are

living at the worst moment. In fact, one of the opening images of the book is this famous, you can tell me, apocryphal or true, moment with Ben Franklin after the Constitutional Convention when he says, hey, you know, that sun on the back of George Washington's chair is the sun rising or setting on the republic that we've created. So at the very moment that the Constitution has been created, there's this anxiety. Are we making progress or are we already in decline? And so you can certainly hear that in the 70s. Now, I think there are particular things about our moment that make those concerns acute in a different way. but they are almost constant in the story of this country.

There are also some bits in this film of a kind of anguished account of American progress. There's another clip, I think, from this lady that I think of as my aunt with the blue glasses. And another thing, we have the different nationality problems, the different color problems. However, we have begun to accept some of it, I think. There's a lot of divisions here in the United States. Used to be called the melting pot. I don't know what's happening here. You know, maybe the compounds are beginning to separate again,

and the people of the United States are diverging again. So, like, if they're going to do anything, rather than celebrating, I think it's the time to start implementing all the things they have on paper, getting it out into the streets. If some people that are in power right now would sort of reconstruct quickly what took place in 1776 and what the colonies wanted

these are what the minorities sometimes want. Is that optimism? Do you hear optimism there? I do to some degree. But what I see there is something that I wonder how much we have of anymore, which is a willingness to think think about a moment like the bicentennial as an opportunity.

A whole range of different movements, but especially movements of social change, social progress, used to seize upon the symbols, the stories of the founding of American national identity. The early women's rights advocates, the abolitionists, were so engaged with these questions about the meaning of the declaration, the meaning of the Constitution, What it is that the country ought to be, could be, has been. Is it not the case that the Tea Party movement or the New King's movement are engaged in that kind of work? Right. I think that those are great examples and great counter examples. So I want to turn to one last clip from the bicentennial film, this young, long-haired guy in a jean jacket and big mirrored shades. I don't know. Maybe progress is regress. I think we've done already enough building.

and enough covering the earth with concrete and destroyed enough in nature already that maybe progress is regress. I don't know. He really captures a moment in history, the sensibility of the mid-70s. Yeah, how so? You can just see the force of all of these movements

and incredible cultural changes that had happened over relatively short period of time, right? He has a counterculture vibe. He has an environmental vibe. environmentalist vibe. He's questioning all the big narratives. You can tell from the pacing of his voice that he may also be shaped by certain things that he has himself imbbed in recent years. I don't want to cast aspersions or suggested. So as a person who has been exploring the implications of this moment, the 250th anniversary of the country. Now for a few years on the road, in classrooms, what is your July 4th plan?

New Haven does actually incredible fireworks every 4th of July. Also, maybe not for the 4th itself, but I want to go to D.C. because there's going to be this wild thing called the Great American State Fair going on that the administration is putting on on the mall. And I'm actually quite curious to see what that's going to look like. I'm sure I won't love all of the history on display there, but I do like that something is happening in this moment. So the energy behind it isn't bad, even though I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to engage the execution. Hey man, progress is regress, you know? That's the way to engage. Beverly Gage is a professor of history.

at Yale University. Her books include G-Man, a biography of Jay Edgar Hoover, and This Land is Your Land. I'd like to see the bicentennial deal with the kind of future I think we're going to have, and I think it's going to be a sort of troubled future.

We're going to talk about that future in a moment. I'm Jill Lepore, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a staff writer for the magazine, and I wrote an essay about the Declaration of Independence for the New Yorker's special issue called America at 250. And that's our theme for today's program also, America at 250.

The MAGA movement has put a lot of attention on America's past. So is the Black Lives Matter movement. It's a big and often pretty heated argument, and most historians aren't really in that argument. Most of us are just watching. But that argument raises vital questions about the role historians play in public life. American history, like any history, is full of beauty and also tragedy. Have historians got the mix right? I wanted to talk about this war over America's past with Jalani Cobb,

who, like me, is both a historian and a journalist. And we're also pretty close in age. We were both kids during the bicentennial. things that stands out to me was that Richard Pryor released an album that year, which we totally cannot even say the name of, but it is bicentennial insert racial epithet here, where he goes in on kind of the contradictions of the founding and race and slavery and, you know, kind of prime targets, exemplifying particular contradictions in the founding of the country. I listen to this Gil Scott Heron piece called Bicentennial Blues.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, like it's some good rhymes about the state of our country. The blues is grown, but not the home. The blues is grown, but the country has not. The blues remembers everything the country forgot. It's a bicentennial year. And the blues is celebrating a birthday.

and it's the bicentennial blues. It seems me that so much about this moment this year goes right to the core of the questions that have animated so much of your work, both as a journalist and as a historian. And yet it's also just kind of just such a messy moment. But at the same time, it seems like this is a moment where we're least likely

to embrace particular kinds of messiness. And what I mean by that is, you know, we saw earlier this year the federal government, you know, attempt to remove the plaques from the president's house in Philadelphia that talked about the history of slavery in the early republic and people who were enslaved at that site. We've had this kind of contentious discussion about American greatness, you know, anchored in the Make America Great Again again, rhetoric that we've seen from Donald Trump. But the problem with that kind of sanitized approach to history, at least in my estimation, is that it prevents you from getting to the things that actually are the basis of acclaim for greatness in saying, you know, out of this incredibly flawed founding moment, there are people

who across generations and across centuries engage in the work often at the cost of their own lives, of trying to push the country in a more democratic direction. And I don't know that we're going to get that particular conversation this year. You know, we've been reading a lot about the kinds of erasures, deletions, suppression, censorship that's going on all over the country, but largely through institutions that are under the influence or control of the national government, like the National Park Service. There's a really kind of amazing organization called Save Our Signs that's been going around taking photos of signs and making a big archive of them online. But how much of an effect will that have? Like, do you think what's the tale of those changes? I think that people are right to be concerned.

You know, the president also said that he thought that the Smithsonian African American Museum focused too much on how tax. terrible slavery was, which is an astounding kind of thing to say, especially if you recognize that the impetus for the American Revolution are offenses that are categorically less than kidnapping, raping, and enslaving, bondage of people. And so it's an astounding thing for someone to say. And at the same time, I feel like you can't unring a bell. that generations of historians have done so much work to increase the public consciousness, to increase the availability of access to this kind of information, that ultimately it would be very difficult to sanitize those kinds of things now.

There's an astounding array of books, documentaries, private museums. You can't unring the bell, not even the Liberty Bell. Not even the movie about. I think the short film that the Trump administration's America 250 Commission had projected onto the Washington Monument over the winter, which is a story of American history, is a good proxy for the version of American history that the federally funded celebration intends to proffer. And as a historian, I find it somewhat bewildering. That film was really interesting. It was strange and demoralizing in a particular way, but also strange. And it was almost like historical trolling because they gerrymandered the founding to include Christopher Columbus.

And I think that was just an attempt to critique people on the left who have associated Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere. with the subsequent tides of warfare and genocide and all the other kinds of things that happened, you know, in the wake of 1492, and him being kind of removed and also the idea that you can discover a place where there are already people living. There is no land acknowledgement in this film. Well, there is a land acknowledgement. It's the acknowledgement that Columbus landed. Yeah, there's a lot of providentialism in it, and in a way, it seemed to me a little bit like, Like, you know, George Bancroft, the 19th century historian, right? He has his providentialist account of the history of the United States that's written in the 1830s.

But it's really the manifesto for manifest destiny. Sure. Like, we're faded to expand across the continent, and that was his agenda, and this is our God-given right. But then it has kind of tacked onto it, like a Mark Andreessenism or like a muskism. It's like a technology boosting. Like that's also like we are faded by our providentism. God to go to Mars. Like, that's kind of where... Right, yeah, yeah. I mean, presidents and presidential administrations have had their preferred

versions of history for a long time. But they did tend to leave it in the hands of historians, where this seems very much like a kind of made-to-order political speech. So who does get to tell the story then this year? I mean, I was thinking, you know, you and I have this weird thing in common, which is that we're both trained as academic. academic scholars of history. And we also work as journalists. You're at the pinnacle of that profession as dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. So I'm wondering if you think about this moment differently in your capacity as a historian. The historian part of me is very interested in how this fits into other kind of commemorative moments. And, you know, it occurred to me that was like,

oh, okay, this is the only president who's been impeached twice. He's wildly polarizing figure. But then I look back to 1976, and those July 4th celebrations were presided over by Gerald Ford, who was not elected president or vice president, and had controversially pardoned Richard Nixon. And so there was that. In 1876, Ulysses S. Grant tax on his comments about the nation's centennial to a state of the union address. He went on and on about the kind of industrial progress and the amount of railroads that,

and he was like, oh, also the bondsmen are now free. But he goes on, he's really into, like, what we would have called GNP, you know, in our time. But the country is still bleeding from the wounds of the Civil War. So I think that none of these moments are really kind of picture-perfect in that way. They just emerge, and then we kind of look at them through the lens of what's going on around us right now. But you know what's so interesting about what you say about the centennial is I think of that celebration as really forward-looking. It really was a celebration of American ingenuity and technical and industrial growth.

And it was very forward-looking, almost like what is the century of the future going to be? And I think the bicentennial was kind of mixed in that regard. People didn't really want to look back except at the costumes. but there was a sense, you know, Ford had given that speech when he took the oath of office. Our long national nightmares come to an end, right? Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Vietnam, these things are behind us. Sure, the recession, but there was, by 76, some sense of maybe it's worth looking forward. But what I think is odd about this 2026 moment and the Make America great, again,

movement's relationship to it is that the future almost seems to be only found in the past. I mean, it's a really, there's no reason for America 250 not to be futuristic, like our version of the Jetsons. Let's look ahead to the next 250 years. What are we going to be doing in space or whatever? But it seems almost uniquely obsessed with the past. It does that curious absence is partly a product of Donald Trump himself because rhetorically, he hasn't been really the kind of president that says, you know, we're going to cure cancer, as Nixon and Obama, you know, both did. Or we're going to go to the moon or we're going to go. I mean, there's, you know, the kind of

occasional passing reference to these things, but that's not what you associate with him. You really associate him with much more of a kind of grievance politic about where we have gone in the past 50 years or so. what I usually refer to as a nostalgiaocracy. Bring back coal. Right. Right. Why?

What is our attachment to coal? I mean, if we, honestly, if we have an industry that can replace coal, and why do we specifically want, you know, internal combustion engines? But I want to ask you, though, I'm really fascinated by what you label as historical trolling, because I think that's spot on. But I also wonder how you respond to the notion that that is a reaction to essentially a kind of historical trolling on the left or what people on the right would feel is like, you know, this kind of woke progressive who insisted that we have land acknowledgments and talk about white fragility and adopt, you know, this new ethnic studies curriculum or, you know, whatever list of things might be on that list of grievances. and that there was an overrotation in that direction that was as top down, not from the office of the president, but from cultural elites, coastal elites, and that the particular emphasis of the America 250 Administrations Commission

is an attempt to rotate back to some norm. You know what I think? I think it's really interesting because, as you very well know, like interpretations of American history have been contentious from the outset. And, you know, there are wildly divergent ideas about what even the American Revolution meant. At first, there's the kind of idea that it's this incredible leap forward for human freedom. And then, you know, generation, another generation of historians, the progressive historians see it as purely a capitalist land. grab, essentially, that benefits the landed aristocracy. And I think that is great and that's healthy

that we debate, you know, what these things mean. And so I think that we have to make room for a divergence of opinions while upholding the same sorts of intellectual standards that the historical profession has benefited from and relies upon. And I think that outside of that, we should, you know, as we say, have maybe argument without end. And yet, school teachers have to have a lesson plan. Sure. It's different than being an academic historian. We're having argument without end.

New evidence emerges, new interpretations, new methods, new people, new ideas. History is the argument, right? But you're the third grade teacher trying to figure out what to do for the 250th in your classroom. You've read all about the 1619 project and its lessons plans are available to you. There's stuff coming from your state legislature, your school district, parents have opinions. You can't really teach to the debate to the third grade or the fifth grade. You can't reliably do that in college with undergrad. No.

Yeah. I think one of the things I sometimes feel really responsible for as a member of the historical profession is. I think that academic historians have largely abdicated their obligation to K through 12 teachers. And there are huge exceptions. But I think it leaves that those classrooms much more vulnerable to this kind of ideological flip-flopping, where, you know, a state will say, you must do this. And then the party affiliation of the legislature will change in the next elections. And then they'll say, no, you must not teach that. You must teach this.

I mean, I think teachers are really afraid to, you know, museums are afraid of what they're going to play. put on their walls. Civics teachers don't know how to teach civics. Like, what are our obligations to engaging in that work with them? You know, we're talking about history where no one really wants to put their head above the parapet. And, you know, you could just go on living your life and doing work that is important for a select number of people, but really getting into the kind of framing of public discourse is where you can get so much trouble that you might reasonably resist ever doing that again.

And at the same time, we really need people to do that. And I think, obviously, your work has pointed to that in some really important ways about us having to do the very difficult work of hammering out a national narrative that we can take pride in, that we can all kind of claim and feel some sort of reflection of ourselves, of our values, of things that we find admirable, and some common basis for us to begin to, you know, work together on the challenges of self-government. Yeah, you know, I think too, you know, I talked to a lot of people late. who say, it's a hard time to be out in public, running for office, engaging in any kind of political discourse or public activity. But their response is tend your own garden. And then, but they think of it as a

kind of a community garden. And I really love that, which is like, all right, we're going to have a potluck for the July 4th. And we're going to invite everybody in the neighborhood, figure out what our neighborhood used to do for July 4th and write July 4th speeches in our fifth grade classroom or, you know, record a Fourth of July speech podcast. Like, just that there are, like, little things in your kids' classroom, in the retirement community that your mother's at, like, have some experience of, hey, what does this mean to you? The idea that we're sitting around waiting for the occupant of the White House to tell us what American history means, you know, that's the thing where you just kind of want to walk into

traffic. But, like... I think it's true. I also think it's consistent with what, you know, people might have thought. in much earlier generations, for all of his contradictions and the things that are critique about him, one of the things I think that Jefferson really got right was his emphasis on localism in American democracy, you know, a kind of civic undertaking with their closest neighbors and, you know, the people who were in their community and sitting down and saying,

this is what we think is right for us. And I understand that these people on the other side of the hill are going to do something that they think is right for them, and we're mostly okay with that. Old-fashioned political tolerance. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I feel I teach at a law school now, and I see where it used to be the most ambitious students wanted to go to Washington, work for the federal government, and a lot of them are going back to their home states, their home towns. And I wonder if you see that in journalism. Yes.

The short answer is yes. And there has been this real emphasis on local news in the past decade in particular. And people have, because local news has been so challenged, it's caused this assessment of all the things that local news does, the way in which they bind communities, the that those local newspapers tend to not be as polarizing because with a small margin of success, you have to bring in everyone and you are also writing for a community that you know very well. That same kind of community work of just being there and having those conversations doing that reporting as part of binding up civil society.

Right. Yeah. Right. And doing the fundamental thing that you have to do in a democracy, which is talk to people, Yeah. Thanks so much, Jelani. It was great having you, and happy 250th. Thank you, and happy 250th to you as well. Jelani Cobb is dean of the journalism school at Columbia University and my fellow staff writer at The New Yorker. I'm Jill Lepore, sitting in for David Remnick for a special program of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

And it's going to continue in the next episode of our podcast. Thanks for joining us. is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Mike Cutchman, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ursulae, with guidance from Emily Boutin, and we had assistance this week from John DeLore.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.