As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, it is valuable to look back at how presidents and Americans reflected on the nation’s earlier milestones ‒ to commemorate the past, remember its founding ideals, and consider its place in the world.

The idea of marking major anniversaries of the nation’s founding dates to 1776, when future President John Adams predicted that independence would be celebrated by succeeding generations as “the great anniversary Festival.” Fifty years later, his son, President John Quincy Adams, would help lead what became known as the "jubilee of independence."

America's 50th anniversary and the 'birthday of liberty'

As the 50th anniversary approached, political divisions were deepening and the generation that had secured independence was passing from the scene.

In 1824, President James Monroe and Congress invited the Marquis de Lafayette ‒ the last significant surviving general of the Continental Army ‒ to return from France for a national tour that would give Americans an opportunity to reconnect with the nation’s founding story.

Welcomed by enormous crowds across the country during what became a yearlong tour, Lafayette served as a living link to the Revolution. At a White House dinner concluding his tour in the fall of 1825, he toasted “the Fourth of July, the birthday of liberty.”

When July 4, 1826, finally arrived, President John Quincy Adams recorded the day’s events in his diary: Volunteer military companies marched on the grounds north of the President’s House ‒ today’s Lafayette Square ‒ before joining a procession to the U.S. Capitol. The president and vice president, John C. Calhoun, followed in carriages behind three senior officers carrying the American flag.

At the Capitol, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud, followed by an anniversary address by a prominent Washington attorney. Adams later wrote that the speech contained several “ingenious” ideas but fell short of the occasion because the speaker had not fully........

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