"All men are created equal" was written in a country that would keep slavery for another eighty-nine years. The Declaration of Independence made promises its authors did not keep, and the argument over who they cover has been carried on ever since — not in the abstract, but in particular courthouses, schools, farms and borders. For the 250th anniversary, the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places programme gathered the places where that argument happened under four words: liberty, equality, memory and belonging.
In St. Louis, a statue of Dred and Harriet Scott stands at the Old Courthouse, where in 1846 the couple sued for their freedom. It is one place of many.
Liberty
Patrick Henry asked for liberty or death; in a country of slavery and inequality, liberty meant very different things to different people.
- Touro Synagogue, Rhode Island: an eighteenth-century synagogue, and a letter from George Washington, show what religious freedom might have meant in the colonial era, and what the First Amendment's religion clauses set out to protect.
- New Philadelphia, Illinois: "Free Frank" McWorter bought his own freedom and his family's, and founded a town to pay for it — freedom hard-earned and precarious.
- Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn: women of the Navy's WAVES reserve, in their own words, on what liberty meant in the Second World War.
Equality
Jefferson's phrase became the text that activists from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Martin Luther King Jr. held the country to.
| Place | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Shields-Ethridge Farm | a white free family and an enslaved African American family on the same land, over generations |
| Rosenwald Schools | Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald building schools for Black children in the segregated South — a partial answer to inequality |
| Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee | a suffragist who fought for women's rights and immigrants' rights at once |
| Rev. Dr. Cynthia Lewis Gaines | school desegregation remembered by someone who lived through its first steps |
Memory
What a country chooses to commemorate says what it thinks it is. At Tonto National Monument, the Salado — an Indigenous people of the Southwest — were included in the centennial celebration of 1876, and later protected under laws like the Antiquities Act. The African Burial Ground in New York is a reminder that slavery was not only Southern: every Atlantic colony used enslaved labour. The Washington Monument's nineteenth-century plans show how a monument's purpose changes as it is built. And the Civil War memorials at Gettysburg, raised by Union and Confederate veterans, were a first draft of history — one that left people out.
Belonging
Who counts as an American has been widened and narrowed by law and by force.
- Mary Ann Shadd Cary, born free in slave-state Delaware, moved between the United States and Canada as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision made free Black Americans' place precarious.
- Castolon, on the Texas border, was a meeting place of Mexican and American settlers, where identity crossed languages.
- The Carlisle Indian Industrial School took American Indian children from their families and forced white American culture on them — a reminder that belonging is not everyone's goal.
- The Pope House in Raleigh shows a Black middle-class family's opportunities and limits under Jim Crow.
- Alaska, entering the Union during the Cold War, raised its own question of what being American meant on the frontier with the Soviet Union.
Sources
Written from the National Park Service's Teaching the 250th with Historic Places: A Field Guide to Lessons for America's Semiquincentennial, a work of the United States government in the public domain. Each place above has a full lesson in the Teaching with Historic Places programme.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
1
0
0
0
Comments
