"The World Joins Our Celebration": The American Bicentennial, National Identity, and Global Memory in an Interdependent Age

Punctuating one of the most difficult, divisive, and turbulent periods in U.S. history, the American Bicentennial in 1976 was an important, if underappreciated, moment in the nation’s past.  The 200^th anniversary of American independence provoked an ongoing culture war – between whites and blacks, men and women, old and young, rich and poor, and conservatives and liberals – about America’s past, present, and future whose stakes were nothing less than the nation’s soul.  The Bicentennial stretched far beyond the nation’s borders, however.  Americans were amidst a crisis in confidence caused by events both domestic and foreign – defeat in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo, and relative U.S. economic and strategic decline, among them.  Moreover, the Bicentennial was at the center of a robust public diplomacy campaign designed by the Department of State and the United States Information Agency to rehabilitate the country’s international standing and rebrand it as a credible power on the rise and still true to its founding principles.  My proposed paper for AHA 2010 will place the Bicentennial within that wider context, exploring the international origins and resonance of a distinctly national affair.  Scholars agree that such public patriotic rituals as the Bicentennial establish a common culture crucial to the formulation, and reformulation, of national identity.  Given that American exceptionalism, U.S. global superiority, and the postwar consensus all appeared to be relics of the past by 1976, did that year’s festivities reorient America’s self-image as to what role it was supposed to play in a newly competitive, interdependent, and multi-polar world?  What ideal image of themselves did Bicentennial-era Americans transmit abroad and how was it received by their foreign interlocutors?  Did the Bicentennial’s export effectively internationalize the national, cultivating a borderless identity with the historical memory of the American Revolution and its principles as a common heritage?