June 2026

Editor's Note: David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times and the forthcoming Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620 (June).

Today’s deep cultural polarization might seem like a recent development, inflamed by partisan news and social media. But as the nation confronted its most literal break during the Civil War, Americans looked back two centuries to understand their disagreements. They didn't see a map of 34 states; they saw the resonances of two seventeenth-century ships still plowing through our waters: the White Lion, an English privateer sailing under Dutch colors, which had brought twenty-odd enslaved Africans to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, and the Mayflower, which arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. This view was no myth; it had historical substance. A cultural war had indeed been sparked at the nation’s origins. It intensified over time, raged fiercely during the Civil War, and has reappeared, albeit under different labels, in today’s ideological divide.

Hit the dirt! The cry came at 4:15 p.m. on June 6, 1966, just before three shotgun blasts exploded from the bushes along Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi. Two of the rounds found their target: James Meredith, a 32-year-old black law student who had the day before embarked on a protest march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. Sixty years ago, as Meredith fell to his knees on the ground, the civil rights movement found itself at a turning point.

In June 1776, while Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, a committee of the Continental Congress began work on another document. Thirteen delegates, most of whom had just two years’ experience in continental politics, were charged with an unprecedented task: They had to invent a brand-new government for a brand-new nation. On November 15, 1777—230 years ago today—Congress approved the finished product and sent it to the states for ratification. Called the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the charter was the brainchild of many of the same minds that would go on to author the Constitution, but it is rarely mentioned in the same breath. After its ratification, the weak, inefficient system it created would last only seven and a half years before the nation’s fathers scrapped it and started over. Derided when it is remembered at all, the Articles was nevertheless an important, if halting, step toward an enduring republic. The earliest formal bond of “perpetual union” between the erstwhile colonies, it announced from its first lines that “The name of this Confederacy shall be the United States of America.”

On the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party — December 16, 1973 — protestors descend on the celebration demanding "environmental protection, racial justice, an end to corporate profiteering. . ."  Several throw empty oil barrels into the harbor.  Others hang President Nixon in effigy. America’s Bicentennial is off to a bad start.

With the full Bicentennial looming, America is in no mood to party. Just 5,000 watched the “Battle of Concord,” half that for Paul Revere’s ride. Meanwhile, every last product is branded “Official Bicentennial...” Beach towels, billiard balls, even Bicentennial bull semen — "Buy six quarts and get the seventh FREE!” — with a picture of George Washington. Is America no better than this?

“The Bicentennial,” one historian notes, “shares two attributes with death and taxes: It is inevitable, and it is uneasily anticipated.” And then the Tall Ships set sail.

Operation Sail had been JFK’s idea. “We are tied to the ocean,” the ex-Navy lieutenant said, “and when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back whence we came.”

On May 9, 1754 an article was published in Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, calling for the British colonies on North America’s eastern seaboard to unite against the threat of French aggression from the western interior. This rousing exhortation was echoed by an accompanying illustration depicting the British colonies as a snake cut into segments and was captioned, “JOIN, or DIE.”

Although often cited as the first political cartoon published in an American newspaper, Franklin’s Join or Die cartoon has since become an iconic symbol of America’s founding struggle. Its progeny were numerous, because the cartoon was immediately copied in other colonial newspapers. It also went on to inspire other powerful artwork associated with American independence, most famously including the Gadsden flag, the war banner created by South Carolina delegate Christopher Gadsden in 1775, on which a similar rattlesnake figure—this one intact—appeared coiled above the words: “Dont Tread on Me.”

When Spencer M. Clark, head of the Treasury Department’s National Currency Bureau, placed his own likeness on paper money in 1866, it ignited a firestorm. The faces of other living persons had recently appeared on currency money with no outcry, so he may have expected the same treatment, but it was not to be. The conflagration over Clark’s face on paper money grew so intense that it led to something Clark never expected: a strict limitation on who can appear on America’s currency, a restriction that endures to this day.

Around 2005, my wife Marion and I were on vacation, touring the Four Corners area (New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado) and I picked up a book by Russell A. Olsen titled, Route 66 Lost & Found.

On the cover was a photo of a trading post somewhere in the Arizona desert. When I saw that photo, I somehow knew that I really wanted to visit and see it with my own eyes.

It took me until 2009 when we went on our first Route 66 tour. It was just the two of us on one Harley, crossing the United States from Chicago to Los Angeles. It was a holiday we both still think was the best we ever had.