“May we wake up from the nightmare that is our current leadership by voting for leaders who care about the people and fulfill our potential as a great country.” — Shelly, Washington, DC
“Happy Birthday, America! We’re back baby!!! GOD Bless America.” — Sarah, Tennessee
“I pray that our 250th anniversary will not be our last.” — Richard, California
The birthday needs for america, 1000’s of them, are scribbled on coloured carboard and sticky Put up-it notes, or submitted on-line. They arrive from Kansas Metropolis, Charlottesville, New York, Chicago. Some are in Spanish or Spanglish; a minimum of one is in Portuguese. Many specific a craving for a return to a world order they understand as misplaced, or reveal a deep sense of misery with pressing crises just like the local weather emergency and the denial of immigrant rights. Some bear particular calls to motion: “Cure cancer!” Others don’t name for something in any respect.
The messages are a part of the On Our 250th initiative, which invitations folks to share their hopes for the nation’s future and democracy forward of subsequent yr’s semiquincentennial. It was conceived by the New York Historic in partnership with Made By Us, a nationwide community of establishments devoted to boosting civic participation, particularly amongst youthful demographics. Twenty-eight museums and websites are participating, with most establishing “wish walls” throughout Civic Season, which runs from Juneteenth to July 4, although some will proceed accumulating needs for months.
At a time when Florida is popping components of the Everglades into detention facilities, when dad and mom can choose their youngsters out of books with LGBTQ+ characters, it’s arduous to not be somewhat cynical about such an initiative. (Mockingly, one collaborating establishment, the Japanese American Nationwide Museum in downtown Los Angeles, needed to delay the venture as a result of the window it was planning to make use of for its “wish wall” needed to be boarded up after the president deployed the Nationwide Guard to suppress anti-ICE protests.) Like ideas and prayers within the aftermath of a taking pictures, the concept of birthday needs at a time of fascism may roil our stomachs.
A customer leaves a “birthday wish” on the New York Historic. (photograph courtesy the museum)
There’s one other means to have a look at it: Individuals from vastly totally different ideological backgrounds usually are not solely attending their native historical past museums in 2025, but in addition volunteering their ideas and convictions and, ideally, participating with these of their fellow guests. Caroline Klibanoff, govt director of Made By Us, mentioned folks had been particularly motivated to share their enter after they had been informed that their contributions can be archived for posterity. On the Smithsonian Establishment’s Nationwide Museum of American Historical past (NMAH) — which alone has collected 10,000 messages — the missives will likely be compiled as a “time capsule” to be opened many years from now, and on the New York Historic, the desires will likely be accessioned into its trove of thousands and thousands of objects.
“People think, ‘I could be part of history. I could be remembered,’” Klibanoff mentioned in a cellphone name with Hyperallergic. “It’s really important for any museum with a collection to do initiatives that are participatory. It’s not every day of the week that the Smithsonian asks you to contribute to their collection.”
Clockwise from high left: the “wish walls” of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Home, the Chicago Historical past Museum, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, and the Woodrow Wilson Home (all photographs courtesy the establishments)
Each Klibanoff and Louise Mirrer, president of the New York Historic (previously the New-York Historic Society, which lately dropped the unwieldy hyphen that dated again to its founding in 1804), additionally invoked the distinctive place that historical past museums maintain within the spectrum of public credibility. A 2021 survey by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) discovered not simply that these establishments are thought of extremely reliable, however that they’re seen as such by each “inclusive” and “anti-inclusive” guests — that’s, by individuals who help Range, Fairness, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts and by individuals who don’t, like many Republicans. The axiom of museums as bastions of public belief has additionally been contested and complex by students and activists who problem the assumption that these areas can provide unmediated experiences. La Tanya S. Autry and Mike Murawski’s deeply influential “Museums Are Not Neutral” marketing campaign debunked the parable of political objectivity in cultural establishments and additional confirmed how striving for neutrality will be detrimental. Others have argued that the very idea of “trust” in museums is a fraught and continuously shifting goal, not least when many guests, particularly folks of colour, report feeling unwelcome in these establishments.
Earlier analysis has discovered that historical past museums specifically rank larger in trustworthiness than different sources of historic info, reminiscent of textbooks, partly as a result of the show of unique objects contributes to a notion of fact and authenticity. “When [museum visitors] see the words of the Constitution, when they see ‘We the People,’ they feel something that brings them back to a moment in time when a nation had principles that, if not at the time respected by all, could be worked out,” Mirrer informed Hyperallergic. The New York Historic is quickly unveiling a set of exhibitions for the 250th anniversary, starting within the fall with a choice of Revolutionary-era paperwork from the David M. Rubenstein Americana Assortment. (Rubenstein, the billionaire lawyer and businessman often called one of many fathers of personal fairness, was ousted as chairman of the Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts by Trump earlier this yr.)
Guests with messages on the NMAH (photograph by Jaclyn Nash, courtesy Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of American Historical past)
Historical past museums might assist fill the hole amid a decline in civics schooling, and confront youthful audiences with info they may not encounter within the classroom.“ I think many people have no idea what democracy is. And that’s why — when we have a leader who makes claims of the ability to do things that are not legitimate within a democracy, like run for a third term — that’s why we have people who say, ‘That’s fine.’ Because they don’t know about the three branches of government,” mentioned Mirrer. “They don’t know that there’s supposed to be checks and balances.”
“Part of the logic of what we’ve been doing, including the 250th birthday wish, is to insist that people recognize how things are supposed to be,” she continued.
At present on view on the New York Historic is Blacklisted: An American Story, which explores the persecution of screenwriters and movie producers through the Crimson Scare — an episode one may think about being omitted from curricula beneath Trump’s mandate to implement “patriotic” views in Okay–12 colleges, even because the president employs the identical ways at present. The administration can be imposing its whitewashing of historical past on museums, defunding exhibitions and packages deemed to advertise so-called “race-centered ideology” or inclusive gender identities, although not with out resistance. (The New York Historic was amongst a whole bunch of organizations that misplaced federal grants as DOGE decimated the Nationwide Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.)
Some messages specific hope for the longer term. (photograph by Jaclyn Nash, courtesy Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of American Historical past)
Even contemplating their caveats and limitations, the sheer variety of historic establishments is a compelling argument for his or her potential as websites of civic engagement, Klibanoff mentioned, noting that there are over 21,000 historical past museums, historic societies, and associated organizations within the US (“more than there are Starbucks”). And guests are certainly participating, as evinced by the “wish walls” blooming throughout america: Messages are written on multicolored ribbons that change into a flowing backyard set up on the Heurich Home Museum in Washington, and on leaf-shaped seed paper on the Virginia Museum of Historical past and Tradition, the place guests are invited to take their texts house, plant them, and “watch their wish grow” right into a native wildflower.
The missives replicate the fact of a fractured nation. There are empty, non-political messages calling for world peace or regurgitating canned expressions (“Talk less, listen more”). Others warn explicitly of a brand new “tyranny” and “oligarchy”; the authors’ voices, if one may hear them, can be breathless with desperation. Maybe most shocking is how lots of the needs are hopeful: “I wish for a more compassionate, generous, and loving America.” “I love my country. I hope that the idea of America can survive these troubling times.”
Hope is, in fact, not sufficient. It can not exchange marching on the streets, calling one’s elected officers, or studying to detect and push again towards propaganda and disinformation. However it’s a essential ingredient of the resistance. As thinker of schooling Sarah M. Stitzlein wrote in her 2020 ebook, “Democracy and hope have a reciprocal relationship where each supports the other.” In spite of everything, if we will’t maintain in our minds the opportunity of higher days forward, then what are we combating for?
