The 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence has become yet another flashpoint in a politically divided America. There are even two different government organisations overseeing the celebrations.

The United States Semiquincentennial Commission was set up by the US Congress in 2016 as a bipartisan body to oversee the semiquincentennial celebration and signed into law by Barack Obama. They branded the celebration as America250 and set to work to plan the national jamboree.

Freedom 250, meanwhile, was set up by the Trump administration under the supervision of the White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday. Federal funds were diverted from the congressional commission towards the events planned by the Trump-aligned celebration.

But more important than the squabbles over who owns the celebrations, the boycotts of the Great American State Fair or the controversies surrounding celebratory monuments such as the 250-foot triumphal arch, dubbed by its critics the “Arc de Trump”, are the battles being fought over whose interpretation of history will be presented as the nation looks back over its first 250 years.

The commemorative celebrations are being run through the National Park Service, part of the Department of the Interior. One of its most important monuments, the President’s House memorial in Philadelphia – where the first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, lived and worked when the city served as America’s capital in the 1790s – has been at the centre of a controversy over competing interpretations of history.

This goes back........

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