This was the seventh week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This one is a particularly fun week for me: in the wide range of stories are many that I insisted we include, and then a dream list of people took time out of their crazy busy schedules to narrate them.
I hope you all are enjoying these are much as we are. Our biggest problem now is that there are way more that we’d like to produce than we have the space for.
A reminder: we designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
Corey O’Connor is the 62nd mayor of Pittsburgh. Mayor O’Connor and his wife, Katie, serve as official ambassadors for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s summer reading program. Mayor O’Connor tells us how “robber baron” Andrew Carnegie gave much of his fortune to building almost 2,000 libraries across the United States.
Dr. Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights attorney, expert, and scholar. She is the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the founder and director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy at Howard University School of Law. Ifill shows us the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that anyone born in the United States is a citizen.
Alison Brown is a Grammy-award winning banjoist, co-founder of Compass Records and recovering investment banker. Brown traces the history of the banjo, from its roots in enslaved Africans’ musical traditions to its lasting influence on American music.
Katie Boyd is a prominent media personality, fitness and spiritual lifestyle coach, and founder of Katie Boyd’s Miss Fit Club. Boyd examines the Miss America pageant, whose century-long history reflects America's slow reckoning with women’s rights and racial equality.
Shana Bushyhead Condill is a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), and Executive Director of the Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina. Shana Bushyhead Condill recounts the Trail of Tears, the brutal forced removal of Indigenous peoples whose survival remains a testament to Native resilience that endures today.
Patterson Hood is a writer and performer, best known as a co-founder and lead singer of the rock & roll band the Drive-By Truckers. He is the son of musician David Hood, a founding member of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Here, Patterson celebrates the Swampers, the Muscle Shoals session musicians who crossed racial lines to create some of America’s most iconic soul and rock records.
Min Jin Lee is the award-winning author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her fiction explores the Korean diaspora and identity, and she currently serves as New York State Author Laureate. Lee profiles Nam June Paik, the Korean American artist who became the father of video art and foresaw our connected digital future.
Antony Blinken served as the 71st U.S. Secretary of State. Here, Blinken profiles Dean Acheson, the statesman who helped build the rules-based international order—from the Marshall Plan to NATO—that stabilized the postwar world.
Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is an American historian and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is the author of new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. Nelson follows the epic journey of Lewis and Clark, who mapped the American West and transformed the young nation’s knowledge of its vast new territory.
Bob Crawford, the bassist for the Avett Brothers, is also a historian, podcast host, childhood cancer advocate, and author of America's Founding Son": John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick. Crawford presents the inspiring life of President John Quincy Adams, who used his post-presidency to fight against slavery.
Rosanne Cash is an author and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. She is one of the few women in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the only woman to receive the Edward MacDowell Medal in Composition. Cash recounts the 1970 Kent State killings, when National Guardsmen opened fire, leaving four students dead and forcing a national reckoning over protest and police violence.
Elinor Lutu-McMoore is the Director of the American Samoa Weather Service and Meteorologist-in-Charge at the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) Pago Pago. Lutu-McMoore tells how an 1889 cyclone that destroyed a fleet of warships in Samoa spurred Congress to build the modern American Navy.
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