America at 250: What Berkeley historians want us to remember

Photo Credit: Meadow Marie via Unsplash

July 13, 2026

By Jessica Ballardo

Beyond the barbecues, fireworks and other festivities, the United States’ 250th birthday was cause for many Americans to reflect on the nation’s founding, identity and future.

While many stories retold around the Fourth emphasize gritty colonists fighting for the ideals of freedom against a vast British Empire — stories populated with tri-corner hats, hand-sewn flags and crates of dumped tea — historians continue to examine the more complex histories behind the founding and the events that followed for the next 250 years. They challenge us to consider, for instance, the experiences of Indigenous nations, enslaved and emancipated people, immigrants who came from across the globe, and communities whose voices have often been overlooked.

Even for UC Berkeley historians, who regularly think about these issues, this July 4 prompted additional reflection. Berkeley historians studying the American Revolution, immigration, public life and cultural history are revisiting the nation’s founding through different lenses. Their research reveals a broader understanding of America’s past: a country grounded in ideals of liberty and democracy, while also marked by struggles over inclusion, power and belonging that have influenced its evolution over 250 years.

We talked to a number of Berkeley’s leading historians to share what they hope Americans will consider as the nation marks 250 years. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Who is considered American?

The racial eligibility for citizenship has dramatically changed since the time of America’s independence. For the first 100 years of America’s history, there was no constitutional definition of citizenship. Based on the British Anglo-legal tradition, Americans assumed that birth on American soil would make you an American. In this situation, the citizenship of racial minorities was very fragile.

In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that no Black person, free or enslaved, is a U.S. citizen. This was changed after the Civil War with the addition of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, which declared all persons born or naturalized in America are citizens of the U.S. Since then, the 14th Amendment has been a really important tool that guarantees the citizenship of people in America regardless of racial status or parents' immigration status.

– Hidetaka Hirota, history professor, author of “Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy”

Debates over citizenship have long been connected to deeper questions about the Revolution’s meaning: whose rights were expanded, whose were denied and how those competing visions shaped the nation’s future.

History Professor Hidetaka Hirota

The Revolution from Indigenous perspectives

The story of the American Revolution looks very different when viewed from Indigenous nations. To the “candid world” that Jefferson addressed in the Declaration, and to themselves, the insurgents were fighting an anticolonial war. They were fighting for political liberation.

But viewed from the perspective of most Indigenous nations, the insurgents were fighting to build their own empire in the trans-Appalachian West. Though its reasons were often cynical, Great Britain had been a brake on the settler invasion of the West. Settlers wanted land and speculators wanted fortunes.

The architects of the emerging nation saw the conversion of Indigenous homelands into settler property as the foundation of the future republic’s political economy. In the West, the violence of the Revolution lasted through the mid-1790s, when the Indigenous resistance was abandoned by Spain and Great Britain. After that, Native communities were forced to surrender vast territories and endure increasingly coercive intrusions into their culture, economy and politics. From their perspective, the triumph of the American Revolution was the triumph of colonialism and empire.

– Brian DeLay, history professor, author of “War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (The Lamar Series in Western History)”

The Revolution reshaped not only the country's borders and political order, but also how Americans connected with one another over time. As the nation evolved, changes in communication transformed public life in ways the founders could scarcely have imagined.

History Professor Brian DeLay

How public life transformed over 250 years

Public life was very different in 1776 than it is in 2026, partly because of media technology, but also because of things like urbanization, religion, entertainment, mass consumption and government policy — and the changes have not always been straightforward or uniform.

In the early years of the republic, America was overwhelmingly rural and most people would go days without encountering a stranger. News about distant happenings typically traveled in print along lines determined by a postal system that was designed to subsidize news broadcasting, so that a dispersed, largely literate, heavily migratory, rural white population could maintain connections to public affairs.

Fast forward to the 1860s, and the media landscape looks very different: a somewhat more urbanized society; many, many more newspapers, some connected to telegraph wire services; and a much larger population now using the postal service not simply to receive news but also to interact directly with friends and family at a distance. Another few decades later, Americans are interacting over the telephone, and soon thereafter Americans are getting their news and entertainment through radio, which introduces new options and constraints.

Perhaps the most striking change we could point to over 250 years is that the very idea that an event takes place at a single moment in time for all people would have made no sense in 1776. Most people living in North America, even those engaged in the colonial resistance, did not experience July 4, 1776 as a particularly notable day, except perhaps in retrospect. Our modern idea of simultaneity across distance would have been foreign to them.

– David Henkin, history professor, author of “The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America”

As public life evolved, so did debates over who belonged and who was welcome in the country. One such debate has remained a constant fixture in American society: the nation’s reliance on immigrant labor, while questioning the place of those workers in society.

History Professor David Henkin

The enduring tension over labor and immigration

The country has always needed foreign labor, precisely because American labor was not enough. But the problem has been that the carriers of that labor — as immigrants and human beings — were often considered undesirable by people who had power in American society.

In the mid-19th century, Irish immigrants contributed to the industrial and infrastructural developments of the U.S. But Protestant Americans despised them because of their Catholic faith. Later in the 19th century, Chinese and Japanese immigrants provided major labor for agriculture and railroads. But this time, the problem was that they were not white.

That history continued with Mexican labor, especially when European and Asian immigration was restricted by federal immigration laws. In places like California, Texas and Arizona, growers heavily depended on Mexican labor. At the same time, Mexicans were seen as inferior and degraded by many white Americans.

You can locate the root cause of this issue in racism or nativism, but the tension persists because there is always a disagreement between the factual reality — the dependence on immigrant labor — and the perception that the people providing that labor are threatening American society.

– Hirota

Taken together, these histories point to a larger question that extends beyond the nation's first 250 years. As Americans look ahead, they may reconsider who is included in the story they tell about themselves.

Rethinking who "we" means

Looking forward, I hope Americans keep in mind that most people currently living in the U.S. do not claim descent from people who participated in the American Revolution or the formation of the country. For that reason, and because the Revolution was a civil war, citizens might wonder why exactly we use the pronoun “we” when narrating the events of 1776.

Independence from Britain had disastrous consequences for Native nations and people in the lands east of the Mississippi River, and it also prolonged the history of slavery in North America. Formal independence did not immediately create a coherent and distinct national identity — nation-building was a protracted project that remained in many ways incomplete for decades after 1776.

Most people think of American history as very short, because the nation is “only” 250 years old. But of course American history is significantly longer. People of European, African and Indigenous descent have lived on this land for many centuries. The United States as a nation is actually older than Germany or Italy, but we think of those countries as much older, because we recognize that their histories long preceded their national consolidation.

– Henkin

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