Jane Pauley hosts CBS special marking America's 250th birthday

Jane Pauley will host CBS News Sunday Morning’s special program marking the United States’ 250th birthday when These United States - America at 250 airs Sunday, June 28, 2026. The broadcast will run at 9:00 a.m. ET on CBS and stream at 11:00 a.m. ET on the CBS News app and Paramount+.

CBS is using the special to frame the semiquincentennial less as a formal anniversary and more as a portrait of national identity through culture. The network’s America at 250 project centers on the Essential American Songbook, a collection built from nominations by dozens of notable Americans and assembled by 90 contributors into 250 songs. That scale turns the anniversary into a survey of the music Americans have treated as shorthand for memory, pride and shared history.

The songbook’s top tier places Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin alongside the effort, a lineup that reaches across folk, rhythm and blues, soul and popular song. The names matter as much as the count. Dylan evokes protest and storytelling, Ray Charles stands for the fusion of gospel, blues and pop, and Aretha Franklin anchors the canon with one of the most recognized voices in American music. CBS promotional material used those artists to signal that the 250th-birthday project will lean on familiar cultural figures rather than political speeches or ceremonial pageantry.

That approach fits Sunday Morning’s long-form format, which has always made room for art, culture and public life alongside news. By placing the semiquincentennial inside a music-driven special, CBS is effectively presenting America at 250 as a living archive built from songs, performers and the judgments of a broad group of contributors. The result is a television event that treats patriotism as a cultural record, not just a date on the calendar.

For CBS, the anniversary push also suggests how mainstream media is choosing to narrate the milestone: through a canon of songs and artists that spans generations, and through a familiar face like Jane Pauley guiding viewers into the country’s next quarter-millennium.