Some people talk about old stories like they’re fragile antiques. 

Don’t touch them. Don’t move them, reinterpret them. The only thing one can do with an old story, they say, is to tell it exactly as it was the first time, or as close to it as we can get. Anything less than maximal “authenticity” is disrespectful.

Parents and teachers alike ought to avoid this trap. The dogma of static stories stifles our kids’ creativity. Believing that those who have gone before are only able to speak in their own voices, in their own time, separates our children from their cultural heritage.

Films, books, retellings—these should not be things we run from, but leaping-off points for telling the same good old stories.

The United States of America is 250 years old today. 

That is a milestone that deserves unreserved pride, gratitude, and celebration.

In an era where doomer nihilism and focusing exclusively on grievances are everywhere, and when both social networks and traditional media primarily reward outrage with attention, it can be surprisingly easy to lose sight of what’s truly important.

But I’m here to tell you: America is important.

Contrary to increasingly popular belief, this country is exceptional in a multitude of incredibly significant ways.

Unlike virtually any nation before us, we built our entire civic structure around timeless philosophical principles. And those ideas were not merely vague slogans or inherited customs; they were codified and written down; debated in public; defended in essays, letters, speeches, newspapers, pamphlets, and sermons; and our founding values have been preserved and ensconced in the law by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

We — uniquely, before anyone else — declared that human beings possess natural rights and argued that those rights do not come “from” the government but from our very humanity. 

Our founders rejected factionalism and asserted that legitimate government exists only to protect the rights we all already have at birth. They deliberately limited the power our rulers could deploy. They protected freedom of speech, defended freedom of religion and conscience, supported the right of individuals to defend themselves and challenge their own leaders, and they grounded all political authority in the consent of the governed instead of by divine right or violent coup.

That foundation gave America the rarest form of national identity. 

We are bound together by a civic tradition, not a single bloodline, tribe, dynasty, or church. People from every continent, language, religion, and background have come here and become American by joining that tradition and embracing American principles. The result is one of the most successful cultural melting pots in human history.

And for anyone who says America has “no history” or “no culture,” I would invite you to look all around you. It’s everywhere.

Our culture is so dominant that many people mistake it for the natural atmosphere of modern life. 

Jazz, blues, country, rock and roll, hip-hop. Hollywood, Broadway, stand-up comedy. Comic books, blue jeans, fast food, baseball, basketball, theme parks, skyscrapers, road trips, national parks, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Nashville, Motown. Disney, Apple, Google, YouTube, and Coca-Cola… These have all shaped the world’s imagination.

Our music fills stadiums not just at home, but equally well in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South & Central America. Our movies define the visual language of entertainment across the globe. Our technology carries the world’s conversations. Our slang terms are known and used worldwide. Our debates about liberty, equality, rights, race, religion, speech, markets, and justice are discussed internationally every day.

We helped give the world a functioning constitutional, republican government at scale. We helped make free speech, due process, equality under the law, abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and democratic self-correction central to the definition of “good government”. 

Our innovators and entrepreneurs gave the world the airplane, the practical light bulb, the telephone, recorded sound, assembly-line manufacturing, modern computing, the internet, the smartphone revolution, the moon landing, and the greatest engine of prosperity ever built. 

At 250, America has a history long enough to command respect and a record of civilizational change that is simply incontrovertible. 

But in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln:

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

We are a nation founded on liberty, sustained by argument, renewed by invention, and open to anyone willing to become part of our story, and we should all fight to preserve that for the future. Not just for our own children and grandchildren, but as a beacon of freedom and opportunity for the entire world to emulate.

Happy 250th birthday, America.

It’s a birthday thoroughly worth celebrating.

Nobody knows their own history or culture by magic.

That may sound obvious, but it’s one of those truths that our society seems determined to forget. 

Children don’t spontaneously discover Shakespeare, Homer, Bach, Beethoven, Frederick Douglass, George Washington, Jane Austen, Michelangelo, Aesop, the Bible, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the basic moral architecture of Western civilization by doomscrolling TikTok long enough.

They have to be consciously, deliberately introduced to these things.

And usually, they have to be introduced by people who already know and love them.

That’s what elders are for. Parents, grandparents, teachers, pastors, neighbors, librarians, coaches, and yes, even writers, animators, filmmakers, and game designers. Every generation inherits a world it did not build. The question is whether the previous generation bothers to explain what that world is, where it came from, and why any of it matters.

Unfortunately, we have often confused “explanation” with “assignment.”

Read this book. Memorize these dates. Write this essay. Take this test.

Academic rigor is important, and rote memorization does have a critical place in people’s intellectual development, but if the first time a young person encounters Homer, Dante, Dickens, Shakespeare, Locke, or Lincoln is as a dead item on a checklist, we probably shouldn’t be shocked when they conclude that all of civilization before 2016 was just boring homework with worse Wi-Fi.

But that’s not how a culture survives.

On June 19, 1865, Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas, to close the final chapter on American institutional slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was two years old by then; the war had ended months earlier. Juneteenth doesn’t celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution alone. It celebrates the moment that those laws became reality across the United States. 

As teachers, students, and citizens, we should reflect on how this moment can teach us not just about the American story but also about America’s place in the story of the world.

Slavery is older than recorded history. 

For most of human civilization, slavery was a fact of life, just another evil that humanity did to each other. Power alone didn’t keep slavery intact. Formal laws and institutionalized customs alike were tied to slavery.

Today, we celebrate the end of that institution. Juneteenth is an opportunity to reflect on America’s decision to destroy slavery as an institution—forever. The abolition of slavery was not inevitable. For millennia, most people thought it was foolish or impossible.

We did it anyway. We did it because America was founded on the words of the Declaration of Independence—that all people are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That radical idea is easy to write and hard to practice. Breaking the ancient chains of slavery was not easy; it took a civil war. But it was necessary for the nation to live up to its founding principles.

When we celebrate Juneteenth, we celebrate our eternal fight to live by the words of the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate the slaves who were freed on that day in 1865, of course, but we choose their freedom to point to the triumph of freedom over slavery for all Americans. All of us are made freer by it. It is not only a victory of one time and place, but of the American spirit over an ancient evil.

Teachers don’t simply need more material that is intellectually sound—they need material that fits state standards, fits their course structure, and fits reading-level expectations. A brilliant, hour-long lecture video is useless to a teacher with forty minutes on a Tuesday and sixteen more state standards to address before the end of the semester. The simple reality is that the system forces teachers into this structure. Lexandria exists to come alongside teachers and provide resources that are actually tailored to classroom needs.

“Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Abraham Lincoln said those words at Gettysburg in 1863—reminding everyone not only that the United States’ existence began with the Declaration of Independence, but also that we were founded on its twin principles of liberty and equality.

In 2026 we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. (For those keeping track, that’s twelve score and ten years.) Today, most accept that the Declaration marked the beginning of the nation’s official existence, but many doubt that we were really founded on liberty and equality. In your classrooms, you might hear students say we were founded on slavery and inequality. They probably didn’t come by those ideas themselves. Ever since the beginning of the American experiment in self-government, there have been those who disagreed with Lincoln’s understanding of what the Founders believed. Now they can be found in all corners of the internet, ready for students to stumble across them and begin to doubt the American Founding.

Sometimes, those people have wanted the Founders to be evil. Think Roger Taney, who wrote the infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford to justify racist policies. Often, these days, they hate the American Founding and believe the talk of liberty and equality was all rhetoric; they might disagree about what, exactly, the Founders really wanted, but they agree it was bad, and that the Founding must have been bad.

As these conversations come up for the 250th, it’s tempting to deflect. These are big subjects, and you might feel unprepared to handle them in the classroom. Instead, we should lean in. Approach the American Founding with confidence. You can do this with two key methods: Primary sources and unblinking honesty. By using the words of the people who lived at the time, we can challenge students to go beyond the narrative they’ve heard online. Ask them: What did people really think? And then, without shrinking from an honest discussion of the issues, follow up with the Founders’ actions. Put the students in the Founders’ shoes and have them grapple with the same questions, the same practical political problems, that the Founders did. With these methods, you can show students the truth, not just the narrative.

Liberty and equality were not convenient slogans meant to paper over injustice. They were standards the nation set for itself, and standards Americans have argued over from the beginning. Teaching the Founding well means showing students how those ideals were asserted, disputed, violated, and expanded to create the nation we know today.