How to Tell the American Story

Illustrations by Tyler Comrie

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On a July afternoon in 2019, I found myself in a large, sun-dappled room within one of America’s great estates. An assemblage of distinguished jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists, and theologians sat around me in a half circle. I was trying to be on my best behavior, but I blurted out a word dirty enough to make them blanch.

In my defense, I thought it was what I had been summoned there to do. An independent commission had spent the previous year contemplating the dismal state of American democracy. In dozens of focus groups that it had convened around the country, participants from across the political spectrum had been quick to identify sources of division—but requests to name the things that united them as Americans were generally met with nervous laughter. The commissioners themselves were convinced that the country needed a shared narrative, but were at odds with one another as to what it should be. And so they called in a handful of outsiders, myself among them, to help inject some fresh thinking into how to find one. The topic was so fraught that we all agreed, before attending, not to be quoted by name.

Our first exercise, the facilitator explained, was intended to build trust—listing words or concepts that all Americans could endorse, even if our definitions might vary. He uncapped his marker and looked around expectantly. I sat there, surrounded by an uncomfortable silence, searching for a word so anodyne that no one could possibly object. I thought about the acute improbability of my own existence. One of my grandfathers was born to Greek immigrants from a village in the mountains above Sparta, the other to Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Other ancestors had fled aboard the Mayflower from the persecution of Puritans in England, aboard a steamship from pogroms in Ukraine, aboard a schooner from Spanish repression in Cuba. Where else would a life like mine even be possible?

[America at 250: The unfinished revolution]

But my loyalty to this country is not merely biographical. I’ve traveled widely enough abroad to acquire real gratitude for the liberties that Americans enjoy, and for what its ideals have meant to those in other lands. I’ve also seen enough of the United States to be painfully aware of how often we fail to live up to those ideals at home. I knew that we were there to figure out how to reconcile those realities, but our common love for this country seemed like the right place to start.

“Patriotism,” I volunteered.

I had rolled a live grenade into the center of the room. One participant flinched, as if struck. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, voices and tempers rising. One woman said the word made her feel excluded. Another said it connoted violence and racism. Still another participant was offended that anyone could be offended by the word. The facilitator declined to write patriotism on the easel. As the quarreling continued, I sat back, stunned. All of the people in the room had come here for the specific purpose of finding a common narrative. What hope did that project have if they could not even agree—each in their own way—on loving the country they were trying to save?

Americans, of course, have never exactly agreed on why this country was founded or what it stands for. Fierce arguments over those questions have long divided families and roiled politics, and even once produced a bloody civil war. But throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, a simplistic patriotic narrative prevailed. “Providence designed that on this continent should be seen an example of democratic government,” a textbook explained to young students in 1872, “which means government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’ ”

Americans defined their nation in this way, by their commitment to a common creed—of equality, rights, and opportunity—and to a corresponding set of democratic ideals that they were modeling for the world. In practice, they generally fell short of those principles, sometimes seeming to pursue their abnegation more than their fulfillment. But the white men who built their fledgling republic around an idea, instead of around a common ancestry, opened the possibility that any who subscribed to its creed could become a citizen. Over time, other Americans demanded that the nation live up to its ideals and recognize their equality. For more than two centuries, our creedal nationalism has been a source of strength, binding together Americans of diverse faiths and backgrounds.

[From the October 2018 issue: Yoni Appelbaum on how Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

But lately, we have discovered that it is also a vulnerability. A nation defined by blood and soil—built around a shared religion or ethnicity—can survive divergent narratives. To a country built on an idea, though, and bound together by a shared understanding of our history, the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal.

In recent decades, the traditional American story has come under sustained attack from both flanks. On the left, scholars and activists suspicious of nationalism have pushed to redefine the United States as a country exceptional mostly for its flaws and crimes. On the right, politicians and commentators hostile to diversity have sought to gloss over those sins and, more recently, lay claim to the nation on behalf of “heritage Americans.” Unable to agree on how to tell our story, we have swiftly abandoned efforts to tell it at all. The hours devoted to social studies in schools are shrinking, and survey courses in American history are vanishing from college campuses. The signature event of the nation’s 250th birthday might prove to be not a keynote speech or a patriotic pageant, but a no-holds-barred UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.

Most Americans are still proud of their country—although the percentage has been declining with each successive generation, and the decline is particularly steep among young progressives. If patriotism is going to be a word that can be used in polite company, then we will need to figure out how to tell the story of ourselves. Because without a coherent national story, we will fail to be a coherent nation.

Our present disagreements would have astonished the historians of the mid-20th century, who found America more remarkable for its consensus than for its conflicts. Americans, the historian Louis Hartz argued, embraced a common liberal tradition, built around a respect for democracy, property, and individual liberty. Many of the scholars in this Cold War–era consensus school were, like Hartz, the children of Jewish immigrants who had found in America a vital refuge, and they wanted to explain its exceptionality. They held a flattering mirror up to the country. Their books became best sellers, they wrote for popular magazines, and they advised prominent politicians.

But theirs was hardly the whole story. In the 1960s, as women and people of color entered the academy in larger numbers, they set about telling the stories that the consensus school had glossed over or ignored. The explosion of scholarship they produced was a tremendous boon for history, the Harvard historian Jill Lepore told me, widening our understanding of our past. The focus of academics swung to class, race, and gender, to giving voice to the voiceless and documenting injustices. No single national story seemed capable of capturing the full diversity of America, and it seemed wrong to even try. “People were suspicious of any national story as the handmaiden of ethnic nationalism, or white nationalism,” Lepore explained. Patriotic histories, after all, had long been used to buttress the oppressive systems that these scholars now sought to unmask.

[From the October 2025 issue: Jill Lepore on how originalism killed the Constitution]

As professors pursued the separate histories of various groups, uncovering neglected stories and challenging facile assumptions, they made comparatively little effort to assemble the pieces into a comprehensible narrative. Scholars largely stopped writing single-volume histories of the United States.

The new histories disagreed with the mid-century consensus school less over the facts than over which ones to emphasize, and how to string them together into a story. Take the simple question of democracy. In Revolutionary America, the franchise was extraordinarily widespread; more than half of adult white men could vote, while in England only about one in seven could do the same. And in the young republic, enfranchisement quickly expanded further, with perhaps 80 percent of adult white men—90 percent in some states—coming to hold the right to vote. This was truly an unprecedentedly broad form of democracy. It was also one that almost entirely excluded women, who, under the doctrine of coverture, had their legal personhood merged into that of their husbands; Black Americans, most of whom were enslaved; and Native Americans, denied citizenship in their own land. The fight to expand the franchise produced a long, at times blood-drenched struggle that has not yet ended. Previous historians had tended to highlight the breadth of the franchise. Now a new generation instead tallied the damage of disenfranchisement, and told the stories of the individuals and groups fighting to secure the right to vote.

The history wars soon spilled beyond college campuses, spreading to high schools and even grade schools. In 1991, the George H. W. Bush administration set out to develop common history standards, and the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, asked a center at UCLA to produce them. But when conservatives reviewed the guidelines, which reflected the latest scholarship, they did not like what they found. Cheney denounced the standards for emphasizing America’s failings over its achievements, and Rush Limbaugh said that they aimed to teach students “that America is a rotten place.” The Senate voted to reject the standards, 99–1.

By 2001, when Bush’s son and Cheney’s husband came into office, they were painfully aware of just how contentious a topic history could be. So as their administration worked with Congress to create the tough accountability framework of No Child Left Behind, they delicately set the question of how to teach history to the side. NCLB held schools responsible for their students’ performance on standardized tests, but only in English and math. There was no such exam for history—less because reformers cared too little about it than because, ironically, everyone cared too much to agree on what should be tested.

Illustration by Tyler Comrie

That’s been bad for American education, and worse for America. Schools that struggled to make the grade on math and English swiftly cut back on other subjects to compensate. At the elementary level, the largest decreases came in the time devoted to social studies, which within a few years dropped by a third, or 76 minutes each week. The high-school history classroom, meanwhile, became the safest place to park the football coach, so that he could earn a full-time salary safely removed from the subjects tested under NCLB. Within a decade, more than a third of social-studies educators were coaching sports or teaching phys ed. They had fewer years of experience and were far more reliant on textbooks and worksheets than their less athletic colleagues, who leaned more heavily on primary sources. Students joked that all of their history teachers had the same first name: Coach. States have since haltingly rolled out standards for history education, but after 30 years of reform, students’ performance on history exams has slightly declined—just 14 percent are rated proficient.

[Read: How to teach American history in a divided country]

The abandonment of the effort to tell the American story is hardly limited to high schools or universities. Nowhere is it more evident, in fact, than in the preparations for America’s 250th birthday. When the Biden administration took over the nascent project, it simply punted on the question of how to create something unifying. The federal Semiquincentennial Commission instead invited people to record their personal history, on the theory that “your story is America’s story.” Local institutions were encouraged to plan events that would speak to their particular communities.

Donald Trump returned to office in 2025 excited to put his own stamp on the occasion. But he appears to have little notion of precisely what we should be honoring. It is hard to discern any message, beyond the president’s love of spectacle and celebrity, from a mixed-martial-arts bout on the South Lawn; or a Formula 1 race in Washington, D.C.; or a colossal archway near the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. Trump’s proposal for a National Garden of American Heroes, where visitors could commune with statues of 250 historic figures, is simply bewildering. The list of honorees bears less resemblance to a pantheon collectively embodying the American idea than to the setup of a bad joke: Davy Crockett, Julia Child, and Kobe Bryant walk into a bar …

It’s our 250th birthday, and no one seems to know what we’re celebrating.

Johann Neem was not quite 3 years old when his parents left Mumbai for San Francisco in 1976. He landed in a world of tantalizing possibility—that people could become better, freer, more prosperous. And as he grew up, eating masala dosas and also Thanksgiving turkey, he understood that he was at once an Indian immigrant and fully American. “Pretty astounding, right?” he told me. “A claim that someone from South Asia can come to this country and become American.”

That claim has astounded new arrivals from the start. President John Quincy Adams, a popular anecdote relates, once asked an Irishman how he liked the United States. “Indeed, sir,” he replied, “I like it very much. I like it so much, that I intend soon, to become a native!” The story was retold in jest, but it contained a deep truth. You had to be born an Irishman, but, as President Ronald Reagan put it, “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Neem is now a historian at Western Washington University, where he has watched the erosion of that promise in dismay. Last year, he delivered the annual lecture on the state of the discipline to the American Historical Association, lamenting the loss of a common and inclusive narrative. (It drew furious responses, including from one leftist scholar who accused him of “retreat, if not outright capitulation” to the fell logic of nationalism.) In recent decades, Neem told me, there have been three competing versions of the American story. The first is grounded in the notion that the United States is a work in progress. This approach mixes the self-flattery of some older histories with frank acknowledgment of the many ways in which America has fallen short of its ideals, incorporating the critical scholarship of recent decades. It approaches the American story as an ongoing struggle between our best impulses and our worst. Neem calls this approach the mainstream school, because it is how most Americans still think about their country, even though it has fallen from favor on campus.

On the left, an approach that Neem terms post-American has taken root, pushing the arguments of the 1970s in an ever more emphatic direction. The United States was built on racism and genocide, it contends, a settler-colonial nation founded in white supremacy, irredeemably illiberal and oppressive. Many scholars who pursue this approach actively seek to decenter the nation in their narratives. They find no common inspiration to be taken from this history, only a litany of sins requiring atonement.

The right, meanwhile, is pursuing what Neem calls a hyper-American approach—fueled in part by opposition to the post-American turn on the left. In some ways, the histories of this school call back to those written in the 19th century, casting the country’s origin as providential—not quite an immaculate conception, but not far off—and emphasizing the morality and timelessness of America’s founding creed. Slavery, in their telling, was not a system on which the country was built, but a deviation from the immutable truths on which it was founded. To reckon too closely with the darker chapters of our past, they suggest, is to risk disenchanting the nation. Trump’s 1776 Commission, typically, called for approaching American history “with reverence and love.”

Last July, Vice President Vance joined the debate, attacking then–New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for saying that he is “proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” To Vance, Mamdani’s words failed to display the gratitude and deference that he believes immigrants like Mamdani ought to show—not only to the American past but also to past Americans. “Who the hell do these people think they are?” he asked. Then he took things one step further. “America is not just an idea,” Vance declared, contending instead that “we’re a particular place, with a particular people.”

Neem discerns within all of this a strange convergence, as both the far right and the far left have come to agree that the history of the United States has been defined by whiteness. The left no longer believes that immigrants of diverse backgrounds should assimilate themselves into a national culture tainted by white supremacy, while the right views immigrants’ very presence in the country as a threat to that same national culture. Naturalized citizens have a particular commitment to the American project—they tend to be more patriotic than native-born Americans, more trusting in our institutions, and more likely to believe that the world would be better off if people elsewhere resembled Americans. But as our national story narrows, it has begun to exclude them. “I’ve seen a change on both ends that makes it harder for someone like me to be an American,” Neem said.

Amid all the fracture and contention, though, are some recent signs that Americans are again seeking a way to tell an inclusive national story. As progressives have begun to fear that the American system might in fact be lost, many have rediscovered its virtues. In 2016, as Trump barreled toward the White House, Khizr Khan brandished a pocket Constitution at the Democratic National Convention to raucous applause from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters alike. During Trump’s first term, the Baby Boomers who once burned flags in youthful rebellion marched off to join the Resistance wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. In his second, the “No Kings” rallies have looked back to the founding era for inspiration.

Historians, many of whom had spent decades tearing apart patriotic myths and decentering the nation-state, awoke to discover that they had, in effect, ceded the task of telling the American story to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich. A few, perhaps emboldened by the growing popular hunger for a narrative, began to produce accounts grounded in the mainstream school, wrestling with America’s defects while still recognizing its ideals. In 2018, Jill Lepore published These Truths, the sort of sweeping single-volume history of the nation that no prominent scholar had attempted in generations. The following year, a Boston College history professor named Heather Cox Richardson launched a newsletter on the premise that “to understand the present, we have to understand how we got here,” and swiftly became the most successful author on Substack.

This is not to say that any agreement on the American project is about to be found. From the vantage point of some on the left, Trump has looked less like a threat to America’s virtues than a confirmation of its vices, decisive evidence that the United States has been a white-supremacist state all along. In The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project,” the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that the American story began not in 1776 but in 1619, with the advent of slavery. The contributions of Black Americans and the consequences of slavery belong “at the very center of our national narrative,” she claimed.

Critics, some eminent historians among them, were swift to note that Hannah-Jones’s history was reductive and, in places, simply wrong. Trump found in “The 1619 Project” a useful foil, attacking it as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” But although her account of America’s origins was extremely gloomy, Hannah-Jones also offered a more optimistic view of the country’s progress through the ensuing centuries. The project chronicled “the struggle of Black Americans to perfect these ideals of liberty, freedom, equality in the law, equality in society,” she told me. “And that’s a redemptive, unifying narrative,” albeit not one that she is sure the nation is ready to accept. Notably, Hannah-Jones’s essay ends with her wish that she could tell her younger self to “boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.”

Conservatives frequently warn that the close study of the darkest chapters of our past will erode any sense of patriotism. In Hannah-Jones’s case, at least, it had the opposite effect. One question she’d sought to answer, as she researched her essay, was why newly emancipated slaves did not leave the country that had so wronged them, as she assumed they would have wanted to do. She read their accounts and saw them argue that, at the moment they had finally gained rights and citizenship, they could not abandon the only land they had ever known. They resolved to stay and to make the nation what it could and should have been. “I actually did find that really inspiring,” she told me. “And I think that’s the first time I ever felt I could see a path to patriotism.”

After Lepore published These Truths, she was astonished by the number of readers who reached out to tell her what the book meant to them. One woman wrote to say that she had bought it to study for her citizenship exam but, enthralled, kept reading. “I really feel like I belong here now,” she wrote, “because I understand the whole journey that is the story of this land and this people and these ideas and this country.” Most significantly, Lepore found that readers wanted to know the full story of their country—the progress and the revanchism, the beauty and the ugliness, the racial massacres and the Indian New Deal.

The Trump administration seems allergic to this kind of complexity. Last March, it issued an executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Among other measures, it instructed the National Park Service to remove signs that “inappropriately disparage” historical figures instead of focusing on the “greatness” of American achievements. A display on George Washington’s slaves came down in Philadelphia; an exhibit at the Grand Canyon was stripped of a passage noting that federal officials had “pushed tribes off their land” to establish the park.

Deleting accounts of the past not because they are false but because they are true betrays a curious lack of confidence. Do the censors fear that Americans will cease to love their country once they know the full story?

The evidence suggests otherwise. Large majorities of Americans prefer history that challenges what they know over accounts that reinforce it. By an almost nine-to-one margin, they think it’s at least as important to learn about other racial and ethnic communities as about their own. And they overwhelmingly agree on the importance of learning about past harms, even when doing so makes them uncomfortable. “I’ve been on the road, literally, for seven years since the project came out, in every type of community,” Hannah-Jones told me. “And I’ve never had someone walk away and say they hate this country. They say they’re ashamed of things this country has done, that they’re deeply disappointed, and they want to see the country be better.” Americans appear aligned not with the unquestioning patriotism of the naval hero Stephen Decatur, who was said to have declared, “My country, right or wrong,” but with the deeper patriotism of the Reconstruction-era Senator Carl Schurz, who added: “If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

[From the November 2025 issue: George Packer on why we still need patriotism]

The American story—the whole American story—deserves to be told. People are hungry to hear it. History, Neem told me, shapes how we understand the moment we’re living in, and “makes it possible for us to see where we’re going.” As our understanding of the past constantly shifts, how we choose to retell our story matters. When the historical revolution of the 1960s and ’70s insisted that we contend with America’s bigotry and exclusion, Neem said, the mainstream narrative evolved to give us a story in which “overcoming racism was to become more American.” Our nation is still evolving; whether the story we tell ourselves can continue to evolve along with it remains to be seen.

I asked Lepore if the United States could cohere without a common narrative. “Everything ends,” she replied, “and this could be a part of what unravels it.” But Neem was more hopeful. “Realizing what we’re losing might enable us to remember the America we want,” he said.

Just down the street from where I live lies one of America’s smallest national cemeteries. On a bright July morning several years ago, I visited it with my daughter, on the anniversary of the Civil War battle it commemorates. Together with a handful of neighbors, we stuck small American flags by the marble headstones of 40 men and boys who, far from their homes, fought in defense of the idea that all are created equal, bound together in a common project. They won the battle but lost their lives. For us, the living, their unfinished work remains.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “How to Tell the American Story.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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