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What exactly is the country being celebrated for 250 years of independence this July?
What is really about? What is its essential character? Or should we stop asking such annoying questions and just do fireworks?
This is the challenge Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the Princeton University professor and author, poses to us with his new book, “America, U.S.A.” What does it mean to celebrate America, he asks, at a moment of what he calls a “second lost cause,” a moment of backsliding away from everything Americans profess to believe?
Has America, Glaude asks, become a country of “freedom snatchers,” rather than “freedom seekers”?
We sat down with him to discuss that and other questions. Some of what we discussed:
How big anniversaries like the coming Semiquincentennial are sometimes used to make us disremember more than remember
How 2026 resembles a national anniversary we celebrated in 1926, which Glaude calls “the decade of the Ku Klux Klan”
Why, despite the wave of white grievance and hatred, and the demolition of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, in the words of one of the professor’s students, “We should live by love but carry the anger.”
Why Glaude thinks of teaching as a subversive activity
Note: You might want to listen to this book on audio, to hear the original music commissioned just for Glaude text.
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And join us this Friday, June 5 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for a conversation with novelist and fellow Substacker Rebecca Makkai about helming the Pulitzer Prize fiction committee this year, and what she looks forward to reading over the summer.
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