In July 1976, I craved those rocket-shaped frozen treats unnaturally colored red, white and blue. I would collect 35 cents from my parents and wait on the curb for the ice-cream truck to come along. I carried my trombone down the main street of my Massachusetts town for a big parade. As a sk inny 10-year-old, the slide was nearly as long as I was tall. The American flag was plastered on our tank tops and shorts and on our magazine covers and television sets. It was a full 200 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and I was all in for a big national party, a massive and defining celebration. I was young, happy, out of school and ready for fun. A half-century later, I wonder whether a 10-year-old today is going to look back with the same fondness over the 250th birthday of the nation’s founding. I suspect I am not alone in concluding that this is just not an exciting time for most of us, even though we are celebrating the same thing as in 1976 – powerful words on parchment from Thomas Jefferson and other colonial leaders asserting that government must strive to ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that if it fails, the people must rise up and form the government they want. I’ve got some theories about why that is. We had more shared experiences back in 1976. The three major television networks seemed to play to the middle. It felt like everyone watched Happy Days and Walter Cronkite and Schoolhouse Rock, and read the stories inside Time magazine. As best I can tell, today’s streaming services and social media feeds aren’t filled with the same kind of flag-waving common content. It may also be that 250 is just not that exciting a number. Sure, it’s a quarter of a millennium, but it’s the nice, round hundreds that capture more attention. Semiquincentennial is an awkward, long word that is sure to fade from our vocabularies pretty fast. Third – and this might be the most polarizing – is that we are living in a political and social climate that fosters anger and resentment, and there are many of us who are lamenting that we may be closer to the end of a well-functioning democratic republic than we are to the beginning. The leaders with the most influential voices are doing little to uplift us and bring us together and try to inspire us with shared values and glittering ideals. In fact, they make us feel silly and naïve for thinking that those ever existed. Instead of bicentennial quarters with a design for each of the 50 states, we are getting a $250 bill with the portrait of a sitting president with a 34 percent approval rating. Maybe how we are now is how we were always meant to be? I reached out to a college friend, Jeff Green. He grew up in Concord, Mass., where the “shot heard ‘round the world” launched the Revolutionary War in 1775. He’s now a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and has studied the beneficial effects of nostalgia. I asked him if he shared my feelings about 1976. “I fully agree that there is a nostalgia about the bicentennial,” Jeff told me in an email. “Especially for people who were children or young adults during that time.” Memories are shaped by a concept known as the fading affect bias, he said, which means that we remember more positive memories, relative to negative memories, the more time has passed. “We have better recall and remember more details of memories during our more formative years, probably because those stages were shorter and stood out,” he said. “Once you get into middle age like me, year after year after year sometimes doesn’t vary nearly as much.” “The mortifying high school prom memory becomes less painful and more amusing over time. The event that freaked us out on the day of our wedding (a band member backed into a marble column) is now the hilarious story we tell often,” he said. To be sure, everything wasn’t so great back in 1976. We were detangling ourselves from a disastrous and unpopular war in Vietnam, which was effectively the first military loss in the nation’ s history. A president had resigned in disgrace, and we were grappling with the knowledge that our leaders could and would lie to us when it served their means. The historian Jill Lepore unearthed in the National Archives a film made by the National Park Service in 1976, called “Birthday Party.” It was an oral history project of sorts that hadn’t been seen in a half century. Folks recorded on the documentary were pretty jaded. You can hear it in their voices: hippie counterculture was fading. The national leader, Gerald Ford, had never been elected as vice president or president, and had pardoned Nixon. Race relations were tense. “I don’t see a great orgy of celebration. Right now we don’t have a lot to celebrate,” said one gentleman. “I’m afraid we are going to leave some people out,” said another. From a third: “At the time of the bicentennial, we still have 8% unemployment. I can’t see any reason to go around patting ourselves on the back for having to survive two centuries.” “America at 250 seems like a mess,” said Lepore in her Political Scene podcast. “But the bicentennial had kind of the same vibe.” Other historians point out that each of our 50-year celebrations have come at messy times. Nativism was ascendent in 1926; Reconstruction was fracturing and violence was wracking the South in 1876; slavery in the territories was tearing at our bonds in 1826. Under the nostalgia theory, some of the bad stuff that was going on in 1976 may have faded from our recollections, especially for those of us who were young then. As a 10-year-old, I was not particularly caught up in Vietnam or Watergate or the goals of the counterculture revolution. I was old enough to have agency, to express wants and needs, but young enough to be naïve about much of the world around me. In my memory, life was good in the summer of 1976 and we had a lot to look forward to. I was listening to catchy hits on the radio like “Silly Love Songs” by Wings and “Don’t Go Breaking My Hear” by Elton John and Kiki Dee. I was filling my Traveler stamp album with bicentennial stamps celebrating the continental army. Caitlyn Jenner, then known as Bruce Jenner, was only weeks away from being crowned the planet’s best athlete. I loved the deep red color of my father’s new Oldsmobile Cutlass, and was looking forward to the day I could drive it. (It would in fact become my first car before my sister would wreck it.) In the summer of 1976, Herb Nitkin drove a maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass he would later hand off to his son, David. Today’s 10-year-olds will surely have fond memories of the World Cup Summer of 2026. If they’re Knicks fans, they will remember where they were when their team claimed a championship. There are songs they stream today that will live in their brains for the rest of their lives. Perhaps there’s a chance, I suppose, that today’s 10-year-olds will be more excited in fifty years to celebrate the birth of the United States – grateful that we made it through this period intact and got to a better place, still pursuing whatever ideals we still agree on. But nostalgia for the semiquincentennial celebration itself? That’s a truth that is just not self-evident. Stamps commemorating America at 200 were common a half-century ago. ...read more read less