Princeton historian Eddie Glaude Jr. isn’t in a celebratory mood as the United States turns 250. His read on the moment is blunt: “America has to grow up.”
Glaude, who studies American history and culture at Princeton University, framed the country’s semiquincentennial through the lens of earlier anniversaries – the centennial of 1876, the bicentennial of 1976 – arguing that the nation has cycled through familiar contradictions at each milestone without fully reckoning with them.
“The divided soul of the nation is in full view,” he said.
That’s not a throwaway line. At 100 years, the country was barely a decade past the Civil War and already dismantling Reconstruction. At 200, it was still absorbing the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. Glaude’s argument, as reported by NPR on Sunday, June 15, 2026, is that those anniversaries arrived with the same national mythology intact – the same insistence that the country was exceptional by default rather than by effort.
He didn’t offer a tidy prescription. The advice to “grow up” is less a policy agenda and more a challenge to the way Americans tell themselves stories about who they are and what the country has actually done – as opposed to what it intended to do.
Whether that argument lands in a year built around parades and fireworks is another question. NPR didn’t report on any institutional or governmental response to Glaude’s framing, and it’s unclear whether his critique will factor into any of the official 250th anniversary programming planned nationally.
Reported by NPR. Read the original report.
