Your Hot Date With George Washington: America’s 250th Anniversary Watch List

In Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, just west of Philadelphia, a tireless reenactor keeps one facet of the American Revolution alive.

Noah Lewis’ historically accurate portrayal of Edward “Ned” Hector, a free Black man who fought in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown during the Revolutionary War, has been a constant presence in classrooms and historical societies across the region. This year, Lewis notches a double milestone: the U.S. Semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding amid a war with the British Empire — and the 30th consecutive year he’s brought that conflict to vivid life.

Lewis, 73, has no plans to hang up his tricorn hat anytime soon. “If you’re fascinated with the Revolutionary War, it’s quite a time to be alive,” he says with a big grin. “The next few years are gonna feel like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Looking back while looking ahead

As the United States Semiquincentennial — also known as the Bisesquicentennial, the Sestercentennial, America 250 and the Quarter Millennium — builds toward July 4, look for a cavalcade of books, documentaries, podcasts and exhibitions about the conflict that transformed 13 sparsely populated colonies hugging the Atlantic Ocean into a continent-spanning superpower and the most influential nation in the world. Reenactors like Lewis will be in demand, as will every other kind of historical storyteller. And a huge slice of their audience will likely be older adults.

According to a 2024 Cato Institute poll, Americans over 50 are not only more inclined to care about history, they retain more of it, too. Nearly half of Americans under 30 don’t know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence (49 percent vs. 35 percent of those over 55), and over a third aren’t familiar with Paul Revere’s midnight ride (35 percent vs. just 1 percent of those over 65). Meanwhile, just under half of people under age 29 see the founders as both villains and heroes, whereas most people over 50 call them heroes only.

It’s clear that the core audience most primed for this anniversary is also the one most likely to show up, subscribe and support. But there’s a fair question lurking beneath the fireworks and bunting: Is there anything left to say about one of our most picked-over wars? We’ve marched through the greatest hits since middle school: Paul Revere’s midnight ride, George Washington holding the army together through the brutal winter at Valley Forge, British General Lord Cornwallis surrendering at Yorktown. Is this anniversary just another victory lap, or do we still have something fresh to learn about our nation’s origin story?

Reenactor Noah Lewis portrays Edward “Ned” Hector, a free Black man who fought in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown during the Revolutionary War.

Courtesy Edward "Ned" Hector

Lewis’ education never ends. “Every day I’m still learning something new,” he says. “You discover something you didn’t know about the war or the people who fought in it.” Even within the reenacting community, new sources keep surfacing. “We’ll be talking about a movie somebody just saw, or a new book, or some YouTube video,” Lewis says. “It still feels like a scavenger hunt.”

The acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, 72, understands the scavenger-hunt feeling better than most. He spent the better part of a decade making The American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour documentary for PBS that premiered last November to record-breaking viewership. “The American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ,” he says. “It turned the world upside down. It’s a cliché, but it’s true.”

Burns learned something new “every single day, every hour of every day, for nearly 10 years,” he says. “You think you know something about our country’s history, and then you realize how much you don’t know.”

Even the basics kept surprising him. For instance, he hadn’t fully clocked how, after the French and Indian War, Britain barred colonists from pushing west of the Appalachians to avoid the cost of protecting them. “And that pissed everybody off, because they were being denied the prize of North America,” he says. “The war was absolutely about taxes and representation, but it was also about so many other things.”

Burns rejects the urge to sandblast the rough edges off the founders. “These were great men, but they were also deeply flawed,” he says. “They made rash decisions on the battlefield and bad decisions in their life.”

Busting American Revolution myths

Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed urges us to sort the myths worth keeping from those to let go. “We need to put aside the idea that 13 plucky colonies beat big, bad Great Britain all by themselves. France made the American victory possible with their military support,” she says. “But some myths are worth holding onto. Every country thinks it’s exceptional, and it makes sense that we do, too. The American experiment is extraordinary, and we should keep believing it has a special message for the world. That’s aspirational.”

Lewis believes age has given him a unique vantage point of how American history has evolved and changed. “During the 1950s and ’60s, when I was growing up, we were told that Black people didn’t do anything in the war,” he says. That story cracked wide open for him in the 1990s while he was researching his family genealogy. It led him to a world he’d never been shown.

“My attitude about colonial Blacks was, they all were slaves, they all were poor, and nothing but manual laborers,” he says. But the more he dug, the more the narrative shifted. “They weren’t just soldiers, they were heroes,” says Lewis. “Without the contribution of all these Black people, there’s a strong possibility we would not have won the American Revolution at all.”

Gordon-Reed hopes more people have these kinds of epiphanies about our nation’s history. She wants the Semiquincentennial to remind us that the Revolution involved far more than the handful of names drilled into us at school, and that its cast included Black soldiers and sailors, Native allies and adversaries, women, immigrants and religious minorities. “We should put to rest the notion that some Americans, because of their race, religion or other immutable characteristics, are less American than others,” she says. “It would reject the notion that America is a white Christian nation only.”

R. Scott Stephenson, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, traces the Declaration’s echoes far beyond Independence Hall. His museum’s exhibition, “The Declaration’s Journey,” treats the parchment as a starting gun, not the finish line. A special time-limited show running through Jan. 3, 2027, it gathers more than 120 objects and documents, like Thomas Jefferson’s Windsor revolving writing chair (believed to have been used in Philadelphia while working on the Declaration draft), military clothing from Mexican revolutionaries, and a printing press that New Yorkers sent to South America in 1811 to spread revolutionary ideas among the Spanish Empire.

That press is returning to the U.S. for the first time in more than two centuries. It is a physical reminder, Stephenson says, that many Americans in the founding generation believed — as Thomas Paine, the radical pamphleteer of Common Sense who fought for independence, once argued — that they “had an opportunity to begin the world over again.”

Photo illustration by AARP; Andrea D'Aquino (Mike Doyle; Brandywine River Museum of Art/Purchased through a grant from the Mabel Pew Myrin Trust, 1984/Bridgeman Images; Princeton University Library; The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

America’s global entanglements

In their toasts and correspondence, Americans imagined the Declaration as exportable: an idea that sovereignty could rest with ordinary people and jump boundaries; an energy that fueled hopes for Irish independence and stirred Spanish colonies across the hemisphere. “They believed that this was a gift, not just to America but for the world,” Stephenson says. Even before the war’s outcome was certain, Americans were plotting a world in which the logic of the Declaration might travel.

Historian Richard Bell, of the University of Maryland, pushes that global frame further in his book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. “We often assume that the Declaration marked the birth of American exceptionalism, the start of a national history somehow separate from world history. But that’s clearly not true,” Bell says. “From its creation, our Declaration — printed by an Irish immigrant, let’s not forget, and on Dutch paper to boot — has pointed outward, reminding us of America’s enduring global entanglements, and serving as midwife to the birth of the modern world.”

Widen the cast, Bell argues, and the stakes become clearer. “For enslaved Black people, the Revolution was a fierce struggle to stage the largest exodus out of bondage since biblical times. For Indigenous people, the war marked a pivotal turning point in their decades-long effort to preserve their own autonomy and independence that permanently transformed the balance of power in the heart of the continent.”

None of those communities was a spectator to America’s struggle. “They were essential stakeholders,” Bell says. “And the stakes were enormous. American independence was nothing less than a geopolitical earthquake.”

The most useful commemorations don’t simply retell. They add context, expand the cast and shift the camera away from the familiar to include women who provisioned armies and organized boycotts; Native nations who calculated impossible choices; and enslaved and free Black Americans whose petitions, service and resistance changed the war’s trajectory and its meaning.

New work is also pulling the Revolution back into a messy global story, one that runs through the Caribbean, London, Paris, West Africa and beyond, and treats ideas as contraband that moves along with people and goods.

What keeps Lewis at it year after year isn’t nostalgia. “I think a lot of problems that we have in our nation today is that we haven’t learned from the past,” he says. “It’s an old trope and we beat it to death, but it still remains true. You know, those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.”

The Semiquincentennial, in his view, is a chance to build better muscle memory: to remember not just the fireworks but the fractures, not just the ideals but the improvisations that made those ideals survivable.