This coming July, America is turning 250. And we’re throwing a party, a year-long celebration of the greatest country on Earth.
For the next 12 months, we’re going to toast to our freedoms. And we’re doing it the Free Press way: by delving into all of it—the bad and the good and the great, the strange and the wonderful and the wild.
Each month, we’ll be focused on one big idea; on a truth we hold to be self-evident about our immigrant roots, our cultural genius, our extensive freedoms, our food, our humor, our sports, and more. There will be events—Amy Coney Barrett just appeared at Lincoln Center; catch Palmer Luckey next month in D.C.—and salons, podcasts, video and more. We’ll also be bringing you exceptional essays from exceptional thinkers about the lessons we can learn from our history and the questions we should be asking as we seek to secure our republic for the next 250 years. Expect bold overtures about loving what makes our nation great, good-faith criticism of the not-so-great parts, and debates to make sense of everything in between.
This month, we’re focused on the most important—and controversial—document in our country’s history: the U.S. Constitution. As Akhil Reed Amar shows, newly minted democracies began to prevail across the globe after 1787, and they did so thanks largely to the military, legal, political, cultural, social, and economic success of America’s Constitution. “The modern democratic world,” Amar writes, “was ‘Made in America.’” And, he tells us, the Constitution is the key to our future, too.
We’re also starting a little series called Americans to Celebrate, which will spotlight some folks we think have been too long overlooked. Accompanying Akhil Reed Amar’s big read is Doriane Lambelet Coleman’s essay on Myra Bradwell—the woman who turned her rejection from the Illinois bar into a crusade for women’s equality and who recognized the possibilities of the Fourteenth Amendment nearly a century before Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Supreme Court did.
We hope you enjoy both pieces, and we’ll see you next month to tackle America’s technological revolution.
—The Editors
America was at war when we celebrated our first birthday. But we declared our independence with immortal words as well as weapons and were born with the prologue to a story of national liberation heard ’round the world. That story evolved over the years—not all of it was happy, and some of it was tragic, with promises betrayed as well as fulfilled. Yet it remained a story of epic proportions and unmatched inspiration.
The problem, as we head toward our 250th birthday celebration, is that we have forgotten it.
Our written constitution, though far from perfect, remains the basis of our republic, but that terse text will not save us. Without a national narrative, our republic cannot long endure.
Already there are whispers of secession, or a so-called national divorce, among notable elected officials and civic leaders. How will we make it to 300 if a wide swath of Americans across the political spectrum either know too little of the American story or “know” things that are flatly false?
