A Look Back at America’s History

Despite our short history, the achievements are many. MDart10/Shutterstock

This Fourth of July, let’s begin the barbecues and fireworks with a calculation.

In two more years, we’ll celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America. Divide the age you’ll be in 2026 by those 250 years, and you’ll discover the percentage of time you’ve been a part of the American story. In 2026, a 10-year-old kid in Sioux City, Iowa, will have already lived 4 percent of our country’s history. That 50-year-old teacher in Rough and Ready, California has been alive and kicking for 20 percent of our saga, while the 75-year-old man in Front Royal, Virginia will be bumped up to 30 percent.

Pretty slick, eh?

Next, try this timeline exercise for another take on Independence Day.

Think of the oldest person you’ve ever met.

In the mid-1990s, Irene Seiberling Harrison (1890–1999) lodged on three separate occasions at the bed-and-breakfast my wife and I then owned in Waynesville, North Carolina. Irene’s father, Frank Seiberling (1859–1955), was the co-founder of the Goodyear Tire Co. in Akron, Ohio. Born just before the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the Civil War, he would likely have grown up knowing many Union Army veterans. Many of those soldiers were the grandchildren of men and women who first drew the breath of life about the time Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration.

String together these beads of history, and we’re reminded of just how young the American story is.

Hearing Stories Firsthand

This third bit of Independence Day diversion is mostly for kids and young adults.

Ask your grandparents or older neighbors about their own childhood and youth. What games did they play? What television shows did they watch? How did they keep in touch with friends and relatives before the invention of smartphones and social media? What did it feel like to watch American astronauts walking on the moon? What was it like on 9/11 when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center?

Hearing such stories firsthand can make for a fascinating excursion into the past. When I was a boy, my grandfather’s brother, Uncle John, introduced me to our family’s history and shared Civil War letters written by my ancestors. In my mid-30s, a normally staid neighbor, Sue Willard Lindsay, beamed with delight as she described the changes in the 1920s that indoor plumbing had brought to Pigeon Street. In 1990, I met an elderly man whose father, having married a much younger woman late in life, was a Confederate veteran. While the above-mentioned Ms. Harrison was staying in our bed-and-breakfast, she informed me that the greatest president of her lifetime was Roosevelt—Theodore, not Franklin.

All these people have since died, but their stories reside in me, bits and pieces of our great American saga that I am passing on to my grandchildren.

Young Nation, Big Achievements

Take a few minutes while firing up the grill or sipping a beer on the deck, and make a mental list of American achievements since 1776.

Here are a few items to help you get started:

• The Declaration of Independence
• The Northwest Ordinance
• The Constitution
• The Bill of Rights
• Lewis and Clark Expedition
• Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper
• John Deere’s steel plow
• Eli Whitney’s cotton gin
• The end of slavery
• The transcontinental railroad
• The denim jeans invented by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis, now ubiquitous around the globe
• Thomas Edison’s incandescent lightbulb
• Edison’s phonograph
• National parks
• Henry Ford’s assembly line and affordable automobiles
• The Panama Canal
• The Wright Brothers and the world’s first powered airplane flight
• Hollywood films
• The shipbuilding and armaments industries of World War II
• Helped defeat the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan
• The Marshall Plan
• The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System
• Aid to countries around the world
• The end of racial segregation with the Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Americans walking on the moon
• The personal computer
• The internet

For all you sweet-tooth aficionados, feel free to add Ruth Wakefield’s chocolate chip cookies to this compendium of achievements.

Missing from this Red, White, and Blue Hall of Fame are all sorts of other categories—sports, exploration, Nobel Prize winners, American writers and artists, entrepreneurs, social welfare organizations, and more.

How is it possible that a nation not quite yet a quarter of a millennium old produced such a dazzling catalog of accomplishments?

A Can-Do Attitude and a Moral Conscience

Some credit America’s vast store of natural resources for her power and wealth. Others point to the American pioneering spirit, that can-do attitude that led settlers through suffering and hardship to plant farms and towns in the wilderness. In the movie “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” an immigrant explains to her grandchildren: “Here in this place each one is good to go as far as he’s good to make himself. This way, the child can be better than the parent, and this is the true way things grow better.” Come to America, this nation composed of nations, and with hard work, sweat, and invention you can pursue your dreams.

Our curious American mix of pragmatism and moral sensibility surely boosted our country’s successes. The great homegrown thinker, William James, fathered the philosophy of pragmatism, writing that the pragmatist “turns away from abstraction … from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins … He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.”

Until recently, the systems of Hegel, Marx, and other European thinkers had no place in America. As a nation, we valued what worked, not a system imposed on human nature from an obscure and tangled philosophy.

Americans overall have long embraced a strong sense of right and wrong, praising virtue and disdaining vice. In the 19th century, for instance, this high ethical standard, preached from church pulpits for most of our history, gave rise to the many movements and organizations that brought an end to slavery and helped the poor and downtrodden.

The Cornerstone

All these explanations for the American Dream stand on one document and a single moment in history. Read the Declaration of Independence, and we find a mix of pragmatic and moral reasons for separating from Great Britain and her king. Most important of all to the American character and destiny is this world-shattering sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Bold words, but they’re not worth the ink with which they were written unless brought to life. That’s just what Americans did. They took to heart Thomas Jefferson’s words, absorbing them, melding them into their flesh and bone, blood and breath. For them and for their descendants, every day in America was Independence Day.

As heirs to this rich endowment, on this Fourth of July let us resolve to do the same.