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Lowell Bicentennial: Caring for Lowell
Many important organizations in Greater Lowell make the region a better place to live. Among them, the Lowell Community Health Center is perhaps the most significant.
Indigo Girls to share songs, stories at Columbus Commons in September
The Indigo Girls and special guest Linda Perry will perform in the Bicentennial Pavilion at the Commons on Sept. 16.
NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building flag was created for a 1976 bicentennial expo
NASA's VAB flag served as a showcase during the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial Exposition on Science and Technology, which was themed "3rd Century America."
New survey shows lackluster support for 250th Anniversary of Declaration of Independence
The split in pride in America's history is nearly the same as 50 years ago during the bicentennial celebrations.
How a UVA Darden Executive Program Alumnus Helped Bring the Rotunda to Taipei
During America’s Bicentennial, a Taiwanese university president found inspiration in UVA’s Rotunda. Fifteen years later, a Darden Executive Program alumnus helped carry that vision across the Pacific.
Comparing the mood of America’s 250th anniversary with its 200th in 1976
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, a look back five decades to 1976 — the year of the nation’s bicentennial — reveals notable similarities with today.
Questlove named as entertainment for Lafayette College’s Student Bicentennial Ball
Questlove will headline the Oct. 16 celebration on the Quad
How Disneyland Remade American Politics
America is turning 250, and The Free Press is marking the occasion with a yearlong series of events, conversations, and stories celebrating our country’s history. Today, we’re taking a journey with historian Beverly Gage to Southern California. Beverly traded the archives for the open road for her new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. We’re proud to publish an excerpt, on the theme park that shaped American politics—and the presidents who loved it. —The Editors On July 17, 1955, Ronald Reagan stood near a mocked-up wood-plank town in Anaheim, California, where a 13-star flag flew incongruously over an “Old West” landscape, and introduced the world to Disneyland. He had been invited by Walt Disney himself to co-host the park’s live ABC broadcast, alongside Art Linkletter and Bob Cummings—three Hollywood actors who seemed to embody a wholesome, all-American ethos. From the imagined past of Frontierland, the show leaped ahead to Tomorrowland, set in the far-off year of 1986, emphasizing the technical marvels yet to come: nuclear energy harnessed for civilian purposes, human beings riding rocket ships into space. Disney foretold great things for a 1980s in which the United States would serve as “a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.” But even he could not predict the most important political fact of the age: that his genial co-host would become president. Southern California was a strange place to build a park about the past, because the region at the time was all about newness and abundance and growth. For a lot of its history, Orange County had been Southern California’s version of flyover country: a vast agricultural expanse between two desirable places, Los Angeles and San Diego. But Disneyland was changing that. Before long, 50 miles south of deep-blue Hollywood, Orange County would become a region famed for its right-wing politics—but also for its mythmaking skills. Those two things, it turned out, went naturally together. ADVERTISEMENT The two presidents Southern California gave America both understood this instinctively. Richard Nixon and Reagan each built a national career on invoking a version of the American past in which the specificities of historical context mattered less than the big picture. For Nixon, progress meant proclaiming a “New American Revolution” on the eve of America’s bicentennial while dismantling the federal programs that had built the postwar middle class. For Reagan, it meant recapturing a lost optimism and an old-fashioned faith in America as an exceptional nation. Both men were less interested in history as it actually happened than in history as it felt—and Orange County, a place that had built itself almost entirely from scratch, turned out to be exactly where the myth of America’s future was getting made. I’m a historian—and historians tend to be myth-busters. With the country’s 250th birthday on the horizon, I figured it was a good time to step out of the ivory tower and check in with the past as it exists here and now, at the museums and monuments and roadside attractions where Americans go to learn about their history. After all my travels—to Davy Crockett’s Tennessee and Texas, to the real Erie Canal, to the birthplace of the American automobile and the actual Old West—I couldn’t miss out on Disneyland, the single most influential historic attraction in U.S. history.