Landmark Lecture: On National Commemorations: The Bicentennial, the Semiquincentennial and What We Can Learn About the Future of the Past

In this talk, Dr. M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska will draw from her book on the 1976 Bicentennial, “History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s,” as well as in-progress research about how Americans are engaging history in order to explore and explain the way that national commemorations help to clarify, crystalize and accelerate emergent trends in historical engagement. How will the upcoming Semiquincentennial reflect what history looks like now?

M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska is an interdisciplinary cultural historian of 19th- and 20th-century United States and an associate professor of history and public history at American University. She is the author of “History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s” (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), which traces the emergence of immersive engagement with the past in postwar American culture and numerous articles in scholarly journals. She is a New America Us@250 fellow and Smithsonian Research Associate. Her work has been profiled in the Washington Post, New York Times, Bloomberg and Time magazine, and in 2022, she was a featured commentator on Netflix’s “D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?” documentary.