Princeton historian says race shadows America’s milestone anniversaries

The nation’s 250th anniversary is arriving under the same pressure that shadowed earlier milestone years: race, power and belonging. Princeton historian Eddie Glaude Jr. says those fractures are not an aside to the American story but the point of the story itself, arguing that the country keeps using anniversaries to polish a myth it has never fully confronted.

Glaude, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has taught there since 2002 and serves on the Morehouse College Board of Trustees. His new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries, was published on May 26, 2026, just ahead of the semiquincentennial. The publisher describes it as an analysis of the country’s refusal to face its true nature at moments when anniversaries invite national mythology, and early praise has come from Bryan Stevenson, Annette Gordon-Reed and Ken Burns.

In interviews around the book’s release, Glaude has been blunt about where he thinks the country stands. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he said. He has also said, “The divided soul of the nation is in full view,” framing the 250th not as a triumphal marker but as another test of whether the United States can reckon with what it has promised and what it has denied.

Glaude places the 2026 anniversary in a longer arc that includes the 1876 centennial and the 1976 bicentennial. Those celebrations, he argues, did not settle the contradiction at the center of the American project. They exposed it, as the country again tried to reconcile lofty founding ideals with racial inequality, and then moved on without resolving the underlying conflict.

His central warning lands on contemporary politics. Glaude has pointed to Supreme Court decisions that weakened the Voting Rights Act and to redistricting fights as direct threats to Black political power. He says those battles show the country still failing to deliver on its founding principles, even as it prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence.

For Glaude, the lesson of the milestone year is not nostalgia but maturity. As the anniversary approaches, he says, “America has to grow up” and can no longer hide in adolescence. That argument gives the semiquincentennial a sharper edge: less a celebration of arrival than a measure of how much of the republic still remains unresolved.