When Did America Begin?
The 1619 Project makes one famous argument for the nation’s start. It’s not necessarily right.
With the beginning of 2021, the United States is clearly entering a new and exciting phase in its history. The pandemic that has ravaged the country for this past year is hopefully ending soon with the proliferation of vaccines and the nation’s largest ever vaccination effort. The Trump era is over as well, no matter what Trump’s diehard supporters in Congress say. The nation is poised to experience significant changes in health care, technology, and work. After four years of heartache, stress, and calamity, Americans are interested in moving forward.
Such a time of significant change involves a reckoning of the nation’s understanding of its past. Previous periods of flux have often led to a change in the idea of when the nation began. This question has implications for the educational system, since it helps organize textbooks and classes. But it also has a philosophical element. The beginning of America is not rooted in the geologic or geographic history of the land that later became this country. Instead, it is the beginning of its shared ideas, a common heritage, or the story of different groups of people who are seen as essential to the nation’s history. The importance of each factor is, like most other topics in the…
