America250 Watch: Check Out TN's Poster

Plus some nice words about ... TikTok?

It’s time for round two of…

America250 Around America 🗺️

We’ve got our eye on how celebrations are shaping up around the country. Here’s a taste.

• Ohio is creating five historical ‘trails’ through the state, with one focusing on its Air and Space connections—“Many small steps led to that first giant leap for mankind, and many of these steps occurred in Ohio.” The road-tripper inside of us loves this idea.

• The Department of the Interior is investing $250 million to improve infrastructure and public access at iconic sites, including the launch of a ‘Make America Skilled Again’ program engaging young adults in some of the repair projects. Not quite the ‘Civilian Conservation Corps.’

• The award for best 250 poster we’ve seen yet goes to Tennessee. Hope every other state tries to top this.

  

More America250 To Think About 🤔

• We’ve got a Google alert set up for ‘America 250’ to help track everything that’s going on. We might need to add a sub-notification for ‘re-education’ 😬. Here’s Newt Gingrich on the opportunity of America’s 250th anniversary:

The 250th anniversary is a terrific opportunity to re-educate two generations of Americans who came out of schools in which patriotism was downplayed, and American history was largely ignored or distorted.

It is also a great opportunity to help tens of millions of legal immigrants gain a deeper and better sense of the country in which they live. Too many first-generation Americans have been misguided by activist teachers and advisers who ignore the importance of America’s unique history.

• “Good Morning America” kicked off its 250th anniversary coverage with a featurette about … lifeguards? Sure, why not.

Nicole Hemmer on Celebrating July 4th 🗽

It is, to be honest, a challenging time to celebrate the United States. The nation’s leaders are cheering on shocking cruelty against immigrants, from the horrifying new detention camps in Florida to the sickening reports of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s torture in an El Salvadoran prison. In a flurry of last-minute rulings, the Supreme Court sanctioned the administration’s lawlessness (more on that in a bit) and Republicans in Congress passed a destructive new bill that will strip poor people of health care while turning immigration detention and deportation into one of the most robustly funded arms of the U.S. government.

But as I sunk into a funk on Friday, I started to get a bit stubborn.

It’s our country, too, and the government’s outrages were not the only story on Independence Day. The recent No Kings protests were a reminder that resistance to authoritarian rule is the reason for the season, and anti-fascists movements in the U.S. have a persuasive claim to the holiday.

I spent the evening of the 4th surrounded by friends and colleagues from across the world, many of them immigrants and children of immigrants. We celebrated the promise and potential of the holiday, if not the reality of the country today. 🧨

Okay, that’s the end of the second America250 Watch. Up next for our paying supporters are more thoughts from Nicole, as well as our usual list of key (and not-so-pivotal) events that took place this week.

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Here’s what happened over the days ahead in American political history…