{"id":315,"date":"2026-07-05T10:41:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T10:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newhomeamerica.com\/?p=315"},"modified":"2026-07-05T10:41:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T10:41:08","slug":"the-horrifying-lessons-of-250-years-of-american-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newhomeamerica.com\/?p=315","title":{"rendered":"The Horrifying Lessons of 250 Years of American History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A History of Violence<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve lived through the last 51 of America\u2019s 250 years. For much of it, I\u2019ve believed that the United States was sick beyond salvation. And yet, I never quite imagined the U.S. would be where it is today. That was a failure of vision because America at 250 is, in my estimation, exactly where it deserves to be. It\u2019s a nation gone rancid, a country polluted by its past, and more so, by the abject failure to reckon with it.<\/p>\n

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Once, it seemed open to question. Would America be the land defined by Jim Crow? Or by the civil rights movement? The country that made war on innocent people half a world away? Or one that owned up to the criminality of that slaughter and turned swords into ploughshares? A nation that jailed women for sending information about birth control through the mail? Or a country that gave people autonomy over their bodies? The odds were always stacked against the U.S., poisoned at the root as it is by twin original sins: settler colonialism and chattel slavery. From these evils, so many other offenses to humanity have flowed. Maybe no country could overcome such a legacy.<\/p>\n

Still, many Americans broke their bodies and laid down their lives trying to atone for the sins of the founders and those that followed them. Ordinary people pressed and struggled to gain some measure of the liberties, equality, and the chance at happiness promised, but not delivered, at America\u2019s birth. In return, they faced terror, truncheons, and tear gas. Year after year, people denied supposedly inalienable rights faced down, for themselves and their neighbors, white-hooded nightriders and bayonet-bearing troops and robber barons and monied interests and hateful bigots and vicious police and craven politicians and foolish experts and infinite hordes of functionaries and good-German-type neighbors willing to do the bidding of oppressors or just look the other way. But because of all these shattered skulls and cracked ribs, endless abuse and arrests and incarcerations, there was a chance for redemption.<\/p>\n

You could almost see it if you squinted hard enough. That fleeting moment when a panoply of rights movements appeared ascendant, and that long arc of the moral universe was straining hard toward justice, and the volunteers of America \u2014 an unarmed army of the better angels of our nature \u2014 were on the march. For an instant, it was there: a shining wave of promise about to swamp the forces of America\u2019s decrepit order. Maybe you glimpsed it in the raucous joy of an occupied campus or park or city block, on a graffiti-scribbled wall, in the smoke of a burning tire, in the frenzied talk of a comrade, in the pages of a banned book, wherever; you sure knew it if you saw it.<\/p>\n

But that shimmering wonder crested, collapsed, and consumed itself. Now you need to crane your neck and strain your eyes to see the bare trace of that high-water mark \u2014 the cruel evidence of the last, best hope for America\u2019s redemption just before it was swept back into the depths. We\u2019ve been drifting ever further from it since.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the question of which America would prevail hadn\u2019t been settled earlier, the reelection of a megalomaniacal, racist, war-mongering, bigoted, vulgar, anti-democratic, authoritarian, inveterate liar, and would-be tyrant to preside over America\u2019s semiquincentennial seemingly resolved it.<\/p>\n

America is the \u201cgreatest, strongest, and most exceptional nation the world has ever known,\u201d said President Donald Trump recently in celebrating the country\u2019s 250th birthday with a rally on the National Mall. He added that it was \u201csuperior to any nation that\u2019s ever been built no matter how many years it took.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Trump\u2019s demented, deteriorating mind might not recall George Orwell\u2019s warning\u00a0in\u00a01984<\/em> \u2014 \u201cWho controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past\u201d \u2014 he or his minions certainly understand the concept on some level. Immediately upon taking office last year, Trump began efforts to whitewash \u2014 quite literally \u2014 American history to match his boasts. An executive order issued last March took aim at a supposed \u201cwidespread effort to rewrite our Nation\u2019s history\u201d to \u201cundermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Trump, however, who has been rewriting history to comport with his claims. For months, to take one example, Trump has fought a pitched battle to censor the history of his presidential predecessor George Washington, whom he calls \u201cour foremost American hero.\u201d For his exploits at Trenton and Valley Forge, for his leadership in the turbulence of the Revolution\u2019s wake, the capital bears Washington\u2019s name and in it a giant obelisk stands in his honor. Most Americans have literally, if not figuratively, long embraced his visage since his face adorns the quarter and the dollar bill.<\/p>\n

In January 2026, crowbar-wielding workmen descended on the President\u2019s House site on Philadelphia\u2019s Independence Mall, where Washington and his wife Martha lived in the 1790s \u2014 when the city was briefly the nation\u2019s capital \u2014 with nine of their slaves. On orders from the Trump administration, the workers pried off panels discussing the ownership of people by our foremost American hero\u2122, details about the lives of those enslaved men and women, and information about the broader history of slavery. Recently, a federal appeals court discarded an injunction\u00a0ordering the National Park Service to restore the site, allowing the Trump administration to\u00a0replace the slavery exhibit. \u201cIt is an attempt to sanitize history and present a version of the past that is more comfortable, but far less truthful,\u201d wrote the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which led the movement to craft the original display.<\/p>\n

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No country can be great, much less the \u201cgreatest,\u201d if it\u2019s afraid of its own people knowing the story of their nation. Trump looks at America and sees an \u201cunparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,\u201d according to that executive order. He claims that malevolent forces have \u201creconstructed\u201d America\u2019s past as \u201cinherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,\u201d fostering \u201ca sense of national shame.\u201d But no one need rewrite U.S. history to foster a sense of unrelenting disgrace. It\u2019s everywhere, if we have the courage to call it out.<\/p>\n

In 1779, for example, Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against native peoples, to bring about the \u201ctotal ruin\u201d of the so-called Six Nations across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. \u201cThe immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements,\u201d he told Maj. Gen. John Sullivan. When the operation was over, Sullivan\u2019s army had destroyed more than 40 villages.<\/p>\n

Such sins of America are legion. Given the time and space, one could name 250 or 250,000 or 2.5 million of them. On this Fourth of July, it\u2019s worth recalling some of those inconvenient truths that Trump would rather you forget and future generations never know.<\/p>\n