America has a big birthday in 2026. Here’s a hint: The celebration will not feel much like the last big one in 1976.

I still believe our nation’s best days are ahead. But our history — and our headlines — suggest we are facing a familiar test. Another fraught fight for freedom and democracy is already upon us. That, too, is part of a pattern. 

HowAmerica marks century anniversaries has looked different from how we mark the halfway points. The difference is not in the fireworks. It is whether we are expanding the idea of who belongs — or shrinking it. 

In 1776, the colonies declared independence from a monarchy and made a radical claim: that all men are created equal. 

By 1826, that promise had narrowed, not widened. 

Slavery was more entrenched and brutal than at the founding. Congress outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, effective in 1808. But it did not weaken slavery. It intensified it. A vast internal slave trade tore families apart as enslaved people were sold farther south to fuel cotton’s explosive growth. 

The nation celebrated independence while perfecting a domestic machinery of human trafficking. 

Another 50 years brought a different moment. 

In July 1876, the centennial told a more hopeful story. The party of Lincoln remained in power. The constitutional amendments guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights were part of the national narrative. Federal troops still protected Black communities in the South. Much would change months later. But on the nation’s birthday, Black Americans were living in an era defined by hard-won freedom. 

That pattern would repeat a century later. 

In 1976, the bicentennial arrived in the midst of desegregation. The mood was reflective. Protest was understood as American. Reconstruction was no longer erased. The country celebrated what many called a second Reconstruction. 

But in 1926 — America’s 150th birthday — the pattern broke the other way. 

The nation was in the grip of xenophobic, antisemitic and racist backlash. White supremacist organizations wielded real political power. Racial violence and intimidation were facts of daily life. Antisemitic conspiracy theories were mass-produced. Anti-Catholic campaigns targeted Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants. 

All of it was wrapped in the language of “100% Americanism.” 

Let me be clear how far this rot went. Henry Ford spread antisemitic conspiracies through the newspaper he owned. Black veterans feared wearing their uniforms in public. The Ku Klux Klan was ascendant on anti-immigrant hate. Mainstream newspapers depicted Catholic immigrants as inherently criminal and dangerous to American society. 

The sesquicentennial did not create these forces. It amplified them. 

Which brings us to now. 

If history is a guide, America’s 250th birthday will feel more like 1926 than 1976. The same currents are visible: immigrants from historically Catholic nations cast as threats, racism on the rise, antisemitic tropes revived, Islamophobia inflamed. 

All dressed up as patriotism. 

But history offers more than warning. It offers instruction. 

In 1926, the civil rights movement did something harder and more powerful than protest alone. It organized the nation’s conscience. 

Leaders claimed the ideals of the American Revolution not as nostalgia, but as goals the country was obligated to reach. They defined American patriotism as expanding freedom. They warned that those who would turn Americans into subjects were the real threat to the founding ideals. They called on their neighbors to build America up, not tear her down. 

That was not naïveté. It was strategy. And it worked. 

Fifty years after 1926 came 1976. Fifty years hence, if the pattern holds, America can be in a better place. 

America’s great birthdays do not measure how free we think we are. They measure how seriously we take the work undone. If we honor this birthday by recommitting to the fight for freedom, this celebration can become a hinge, not a warning. 

The writer is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.