The 250th anniversary of U.S. independence has revived a debate on what it means to be American. This has spotlighted at least two competing stories on American identity: One hinges on a conventional understanding of national identity as a state-centered project characterized by jurisdictional boundaries and physical separation between peoples; a competing story, based on shared experiences, cultures, and diasporas, claims that “American” is a term that cuts across national differences and refers to the entire Western Hemisphere.

Both accounts of American culture and identity have been taken up recently in public discourse. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has made the go-it-alone, state-centered narrative a central dimension of its historical nostalgia. As the White House states, the goal of its 250th anniversary programming is to “inspire a renewed love for American history.” In response, popular discourse has embraced a hemispheric conception of American culture that celebrates diasporic traditions while critiquing the imperial tendencies of the United States. This framing was famously deployed by Bad Bunny during the Super Bowl LX halftime show, but it has also been used to think about language, history, and artistic production.

The 250th anniversary of U.S. independence has revived a debate on what it means to be American. This has spotlighted at least two competing stories on American identity: One hinges on a conventional understanding of national identity as a state-centered project characterized by jurisdictional boundaries and physical separation between peoples; a competing story, based on shared experiences, cultures, and diasporas, claims that “American” is a term that cuts across national differences and refers to the entire Western Hemisphere.

This article is adapted from A New World of Revolutions: Popular Imaginations and Movements Across the Americas by Arturo Chang (Princeton University Press, 256 pp., $39.95, June 2026).

Both accounts of American culture and identity have been taken up recently in public discourse. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has made the go-it-alone, state-centered narrative a central dimension of its historical nostalgia. As the White House states, the goal of its 250th anniversary programming is to “inspire a renewed love for American history.” In response, popular discourse has embraced a hemispheric conception of American culture that celebrates diasporic traditions while critiquing the imperial tendencies of the United States. This framing was famously deployed by Bad Bunny during the Super Bowl LX halftime show, but it has also been used to think about language, history, and artistic production.

Recent scholarship on the so-called age of revolutions—the period from around 1775 to 1840 characterized by popular uprisings against colonial rule—has supported this latter definition, as it has uncovered shared concerns, bonds, and political innovations throughout the Western Hemisphere. In my new book, A New World of Revolutions, I argue for this approach as well, situating the U.S. revolutionary tradition among the publics, identities, and cultures that spanned from the Northern Arctic to Patagonia. These histories reinforce the notion that American identities and ideas far exceed the institutional and physical boundaries of the nation-state.

Despite evidence of these hemispheric bonds, Trump likes to return to this period to justify U.S. intervention across the world. Celebratory programming around the 250th anniversary explicitly connected his America First approach to the Monroe........

© Foreign Policy