America turns 250 this year. The celebrations are already underway — and so are the questions.President Donald Trump has put himself at the center of the anniversary in Washington, DC, with hype-filled plans for festivals and fireworks. Nationally, the lead-up has turned into a roiling conversation about what America even represents these days — how we all grapple with American identity, politics, and competing visions for the country.Vox’s journalists have been asking those questions, too, and turning up surprising insights about American history, smart ideas about our future, and even some unheralded good news about the present. The stories below explore America’s quarter-millennium moment from different angles, looking at the forces shaping American life at 250 and beyond.5 books that define America — for better and for worseMiguel Porlan for VoxSome countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper.“America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,” said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it’s like to live in this strange new land.Read Article >America’s housing was built for a world we no longer live inMiguel Porlan for VoxAmerica’s housing supply was built for a world we no longer live in. But what will replace it?As the nation turns 250, that is one of the most important questions we face in the coming decades. Building enough homes, of the right kind, and in the right places is a prerequisite for economic opportunity and growth. Our crippling housing shortage is upstream of many of the problems that ail the US, from our cost of living and increasingly zero-sum politics to our seemingly intractable national bad mood.Read Article >The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse?America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place.The president who presided over the country’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice president had resigned in disgrace, making him the sole US president who was never actually elected. The Vietnam War had ended in defeat and disgrace when Saigon fell the year before, after the deaths of nearly 60,000 American servicemembers. Inflation hit double digits in 1974 and stayed ugly, unemployment sat near 8 percent, and economists had to invent a word — stagflation — for an economy that seemed to encompass the worst of both worlds.Read Article >Will Trump ruin America’s birthday?President Donald Trump has big plans for America’s 250th birthday celebration, which gets underway this month. Some are anodyne: a state fair on the National Mall, for example, and what will reportedly be a record-breaking fireworks display.Others, though, are focused a little bit more on Trump than America: There will also be a UFC cage match on the South Lawn of the White House (on the president’s birthday), and a planned “Freedom 250” concert has already morphed into a full-blown Trump rally. And the whole thing is being presided over by not one but two groups: America250, Congress’s decade-old initiative to celebrate the country, and Freedom 250, which is the Trump administration’s very own.Read Article >Trump’s Freedom 250 fest crashout proves he’s the only true MAGA celebrityPresident Donald Trump spent the weekend crashing out on TruthSocial as artist after artist dropped out of the Freedom 250 festival, a White House concert series that will celebrate America’s 250th anniversary later this month. Trump ultimately declared he wanted to cancel the concert and replace it with a rally, featuring “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime” — himself.Trump’s tantrum illuminates an element of his presidency that seems to both delight him and cause him great distress: 10 years into the MAGA movement, Trump remains the only true star MAGA has to offer. There is no one else willing to affiliate themselves with the movement who can pull in crowds the way Trump can, a fact that appears to be both flattering and humiliating to him.Read Article >Heather Cox Richardson grades AmericaHow would you grade America’s first 250 years?That’s the question I posed to historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson on this week’s episode of America, Actually — and a question I pose to myself.Read Article >