The 1876 American Centennial Exhibition, held in Philadelphia, showcased innovations ranging from steam engines to the telephone to soda water.
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America’s big birthdays can’t escape the times they’re in.
This year’s 250th celebrations come at a tumultuous moment for the country, between economic uncertainty, foreign conflicts and political polarization.
And they have faced accusations of politicization, in large part because President Trump — in addition to using the anniversary to push for controversial construction projects — created his own planning committee to bypass an existing bipartisan one.
Marc Stein, a history professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History Of The 1970s, sees some “eerie parallels” between 2026 and the last big birthday in 1976.
Crowds filled a pier at New York Harbor to see an international parade of tall ships as part of the bicentennial celebrations in July 1976.
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“We’re, quote-unquote, ‘celebrating’ in the aftermath of impeachment proceedings, in the aftermath of major Supreme Court decisions about executive authority and presidential leadership,” he told NPR. “Again, quote-unquote, ‘celebrating’ in the midst of international conflict, energy and economic crises.”
Plans for this summer include concerts and commemorations across the country. The nation’s capital is hosting a massive fireworks display and a controversial state fair. And 16 U.S. cities are hosting World Cup soccer games, proving a patriotic experience for locals and tourists.
How does all this compare to America’s past birthday parties?
NPR spoke to historians about how the U.S. marked other big milestones between 1826 and 1926 (you can read more about 1976). They evolved over the years from organic celebrations to more expensive — and sometimes controversial — affairs.
Historian and author Fergus Bordewich says part of the change in tone is due to the passage of time.
“After 1876, as Americans got further and further away from the founding, the founding kind of hardened into myth,” he says. “It was still vital and alive to Americans in ’76, and became less so as the generations went on and George Washington became a kind of untouchable icon rather than somebody your grandfather remembered.”
Here’s how past celebrations played out — and what we can learn from them today.
1826: An auspicious jubilee sees the deaths of two founders
Americans celebrated July Fourth with local feasts and festivities in the early 1800s, as seen in this 1819 painting by John Lewis Krimmel of Philadelphia.
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In the years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans celebrated every Fourth of July with various readings, feasts, parades and bonfires in their communities.
But there wasn’t a meaningful nationwide celebration until the 50th anniversary, also known as the “Jubilee of Independence,” says Andrew Burstein, a professor emeritus of history at Louisiana State University.
“Why it’s so extraordinary is that there were still veterans of the [American] Revolution, survivors of Valley Forge,” he adds. “People were old at 60 back then. And these were men in their 70s, 80s and even 90s.”
By 1826, just three of the U.S. founding fathers were still alive: Charles Carroll, James Madison and John Adams. People toasted to them — and other national heroes like George Washington and France’s Marquis de Lafayette — at the parades and dinners that took place in towns across the country.
“The fact that it rained just about everywhere on July 4, 1826, didn’t put a damper on the day’s celebrations,” Burstein says. “This was the rising generation who were paying homage to their parents, to the founding generation.”
The revelers didn’t know, however, that Adams and Jefferson died within hours of each other on July Fourth.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (second and third from left), shown helping draft the Declaration of Independence, died on the same day 50 years after it was adopted.
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Adams, whose health had been failing, died at age 90 on his farm in Massachusetts. His apocryphal last words, referencing his lifelong friend and rival, were “Thomas Jefferson survives.” In fact, Burstein says, the end of Adams’ sentence was garbled and lost to history — and he didn’t know that Jefferson, 83, had died earlier that day in Virginia.
As the news trickled across the country in the days that followed, Burstein says, Americans saw the dual deaths not as pure coincidence but a “larger-than-life phenomenon.”
“It was regarded not only as a mathematical improbability, but as a sign of providence that God had, in a way, symbolically blessed the United States by taking on a journey to heaven two of the three surviving signers of the Declaration,” he adds.
Burstein says it also had the effect of bringing all of the states — 24 at the time — together in a simultaneous mix of mourning and glory.
The 50th anniversary was otherwise a localized affair. There was no White House-led commemoration, though President John Quincy Adams attended events in D.C. (he didn’t find out about his father’s death until days later).
And, despite its relative proximity to the contentious election of 1824 — which was decided by the House of Representatives after no candidate won a majority — Burstein says the jubilee was “one of the few moments when partisanship did not dominate the political conversation.”
“There was a celebration of both the inner strength and outward courage of the surviving veterans and those who had been lost. And accompanying that, a sense of the stability of the American republic,” he says. “So it’s one of those rare, truly optimistic moments in American history.”
1876: An unprecedented World’s Fair puts America on the map
America celebrated its 100th birthday by hosting its first-ever world’s fair, a massive international exhibition designed to showcase the country’s best in science, technology, culture and industry.
A college professor in Indiana is credited with suggesting that Philadelphia — where the Declaration of Independence was signed — host what would become known as the 1876 Centennial Exposition.
The idea of marking the 100th anniversary caught on immediately, according to Bordewich, who wrote a book about the fair.
“And pretty quickly, all companies, industries, political figures signed on to the idea of a great celebration … which would, on one hand, celebrate the achievements of the nation in its first 100 years, but also look back towards the founding,” he says.
The fair, which ran from May to December, took place on a 285-acre tract of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Exhibits were held inside more than 250 pavilions, including the creatively named “Main Exhibition Building” that — at roughly 1900 feet long by 500 feet wide — was the largest manmade structure in the world at the time.
Nearly 10 million people attended the fair during its six-month operation, including many from overseas. Bordewich says about 20% of the American population visited Philadelphia, mostly via direct passenger service provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad — one of the fair’s biggest sponsors.
“They flooded Philadelphia from every direction,” he says. “And what they saw was a kind of phantasmagoria of industrial might.”
Visitors to the 1876 exposition tasted popcorn, among other delicacies, for the first time.
Centennial Exhibition 1876 Philadelphia Scrapbook/Free Library of Philadelphia
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Centennial Exhibition 1876 Philadelphia Scrapbook/Free Library of Philadelphia
The fair displayed a host of technological firsts, from the typewriter to the telephone. People had their first taste of delicacies like soda water, Heinz ketchup, popcorn and bananas. There were consumer goods as far as the eye could see, and the first official national exhibit of American artwork.
“It was meant to demonstrate … that America was not only a titanic industrial power, but also a modern cultural triumph comparable to Europe,” Bordewich says. “Indeed, you can say that the centennial really did mark — in Americans’ and Europeans’ minds — America’s emergence.”
Bordewich says the fair was “universally popular” — though it was not without controversy, just a decade out from the Civil War and in the final year of Reconstruction.
Some Southern states boycotted the fair because of financial struggles and lingering resentment. Bordewich says Northern states tried to make the southerners feel welcome, including by emphasizing reconciliation in their exhibits and intentionally excluding African Americans from well-paying fair jobs. Frederick Douglass was invited only to sit onstage, not to speak.
Still, Bordewich says, the fair was largely apolitical. It was driven largely by corporate interests, with some amount of federal funding and support. President Ulysses Grant’s involvement was essentially limited to a speech on opening day.
Grant was known for his humility. Bordewich says today’s administration and political climate in general couldn’t be more different.
“Americans in 1876 loved their institutions,” he says. They loved their government. They might complain about politicians, with good reason sometimes, but they loved the institutions. They took immense pride in their uniqueness. And that’s not true today.”
Polls show that Americans’ trust in their institutions has declined sharply in recent years. Bordewich would have liked to see the 250th celebrations accompanied by more of a “reinvestment in civic education” to increase ‘ understanding — and hopefully appreciation — of what makes American democracy so unique.
1926: Corruption and weather turn a fair into “America’s greatest flop”
A cavalry regiment leads the inaugural parade beneath a huge reproduction of the Liberty Bell at the 1926 world’s fair in Philadelphia.
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John Wanamaker, a wealthy Philadelphia department store owner — who owed his fortune in large part to the success of the 1876 fair — started pushing a decade in advance for the city to hold another such event for America’s 150th birthday (its “sesquicentennial”).
Progress was stalled by World War I and Wanamaker’s death in 1922. The 1926 World’s Fair seemed “dead in the water,” says Thomas H. Keels, a Philadelphia-based historian and commentator.
“And then the new mayor picks it up, W. Freeland Kendrick, and it becomes his baby,” he adds. “And that’s when things start going really wrong.”
As Keels describes it, Philadelphia was likely the most corrupt city in the U.S. at this time. And Kendrick was the puppet of U.S. Congressman William Vare, who “ruled Philadelphia with an iron fist” and thought a successful fair would benefit his senate campaign.
Rep. William Vare, who represented part of Philadelphia in the U.S. House of Representatives, pictured in 1922.
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Library of Congress
Vare had Kendrick move the fair location from Fairmount Park to a swampy area of South Philadelphia known as The Neck.
“It is the most remote, poverty-stricken, difficult-to-get-to area in Philadelphia,” Keels says. “But it’s where Vare was born, it’s in his congressional district and he owns a lot of land there, which he will happily lease or sell to the sesquicentennial.”
Because of the marshy terrain, the city had to spend over $10 million just trucking in dirt to fill the land, which Keels says delayed construction and “effectively bankrupts the fair years before it opens.”
The fair was scheduled to open June 1, 1926. But when a congressional delegation came to visit that January, they saw only torn-up soil and a partially built stadium. They offered to give the city millions more in funding if it postponed the fair by a year.
“Any sane person would delay the fair for a year. Kendrick not only refuses to, he moves up opening day from June 1st to May 31st,” Keels says. “From that point on, it’s just a madhouse.”
On opening day, the fair’s main symbol — a lightbulb-studded replica of the Liberty Bell — was covered in scaffolding, and only two attractions were ready, Keels says. Philadelphia was having one of its rainiest summers on record, and people were “slogging through mud because none of the sidewalks had been put in.”
Extreme heat during a Flag Day ceremony in June caused participating schoolchildren to “simply drop on the ground,” Keels says. Major thunderstorms on July Fourth created leaks in shoddy pavilion roofs — one structure almost collapsed altogether — and damaged the exhibits inside.
Keels says the “only saving grace” of the fair was the “High Street of 1776” exhibit, created by a group of prominent, well-off women. They recreated dozens of historical buildings, complete with historical reenactments and costumed docents — which was, ironically, ahead of its time.
“These women, without realizing it, invented the house museum, living historians, interactive historical environments,” Keels says.
The fair stretched on, plagued by bad weather, low attendance and bad reviews. By August, Variety had declared it “America’s Greatest Flop.” Still, organizers extended it by another month, through the end of December, in what Keels calls “a vain attempt to get some money back.” By the time it closed, on Dec. 31, it had less than 5 million paying visitors — about half of what the 1876 fair drew.
“And of course, the U.S. population had practically tripled in the 50 years [since],” Keels says. “You had little inventions like the car, the radio, the airplane that should have made it easier. But nobody wanted to go.”
An August 1926 edition of “Variety” had less-than-stellar reviews of the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
New York, NY: Variety Publishing Company/Internet Archive
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New York, NY: Variety Publishing Company/Internet Archive
There were political as well as financial consequences. Kendrick served only one term as mayor. And Vare won his Senate bid but never got seated: He was blocked by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers over fraud and corruption allegations.
Keels says the Liberty Bell replica, which cost over $10,000 to make, sold for only $60. He’s spoken to elderly people who remember seeing piles of rubble on the former fairgrounds until the late 1930s, “because nobody could agree on whose responsibility it was to bury them.” And the financial toll lingered: By 1928, the city didn’t have money to pay its police and firemen.
“This really points to what happens when what is meant to be a national civic celebration gets kidnapped by a small cadre of individuals who use it purely for their own gain, with no thought about the public welfare or the public good,” Keels says, drawing parallels to the increasingly partisan 250th celebrations in D.C.
He encourages people to “find their own happiness” with whichever celebrations are most meaningful to them, especially at the local level. In his case, he’s enjoying the thrill and camaraderie of living in one of the World Cup host cities.
“I feel very happy that Philadelphia, which has stumbled in the past … is putting such a good foot forward to the world and we’re attracting so many international visitors,” he said. “This maybe is our version of the world’s fair.”