In the bicentennial summer of 1976, the United States staged what was, by some measures, the largest single celebration in the country’s history. Tall ships in New York harbor. Fireworks over the Mall. Specially-minted bicentennial quarters. A made-for-TV reconciliation after Vietnam and Watergate, after the assassinations and the riots and the burnings of the long sixties. The country told itself, for a few weeks at least, that it was still the country it remembered being.

Fifty years on, the United States is preparing to mark a quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, and it cannot even agree on who is meant to be in charge of the party. There is the official commemoration, America 250, which has been preparing for this moment since 2016, when Congress set up a statutorily bipartisan commission to do the work. And there is, as of last year, a rival: Freedom 250, a Trump White House task force set up by executive order and run by the president and his appointees, which has been quietly siphoning funds and branding from the official commission and staging its own splashier, more overtly partisan events. Meanwhile, the historic sites (Mount Vernon, Monticello, Independence Hall, Boston’s Freedom Trail) are each navigating the politics of all this in their own way, depending on their donors, their visitors, and their nerve.

What does an anniversary do, exactly? Does it suspend our quarrels for a moment, or sharpen them? In a country whose civil religion has always run along the rails of the jeremiad (the sermon that calls a fallen people back to their founding promise), what kinds of jeremiads are being preached in 2026, and by whom?

To discuss whether there is any chance of a consensual 250th celebration in such a polarised environment, Adam is joined by James Morone, the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He’s the author, among other books, of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. And by Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent book, A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic, came out last year. He is also editor of a new collection, The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding, published this spring.

The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk

If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving

Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is there anything more distinctively American than its sports culture?

In a previous episode of this podcast, we discussed the tragic decline and partial revival of American cricket. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off in the US Adam asks why a sport that took over the world has been so marginal for so long in America – and wonders if that’s finally changing.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a form of football that had begun in English public schools became a global phenomenon, played almost everywhere except in the United States.

There, a strange alternative form of football was played instead, one in which men in helmets stand around for long periods, interrupted by occasional violent bursts of energy.

This is a story about culture, gender politics, race, class and migration – and, as with the story of cricket’s demise -- about nationhood.

Guests on this episode: Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History at Columbia. His most recent book is The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) which tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice over the last 150 years. And by Uta Balbier, Professor of US History at Oxford, a transnational historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in sport history.

The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk

If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving

Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The rebels who tried to break up the United States in the 1860s thought of themselves as the rightful heirs to the spirit of 1776. The South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession took the Declaration of Independence as its template. Washington’s face appeared on Confederate banknotes and the Confederacy’s Great Seal. Many of the leaders of the Revolution of the 1860s were the literal grandsons of the men who had made the Revolution of the 1770s.

In this episode, Adam explores an alternative legacy of 1776. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence launched the United States. It also licensed the greatest-ever effort to break it up. In conversation with Caroline E. Janney of the University of Virginia and Robert Hancock, Senior Curator at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Adam discusses how the Confederacy built a national identity in four short years out of the material the Founding had left lying around: the flags, the seals, the songs, the textbooks, the sermons, the fast days and the inaugurations.

A century and a half later, as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Confederates remain among that document’s most committed readers.

The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk

If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving

Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.