What exactly are Americans celebrating in 2026?

For the better part of a year, I was a horse-carriage driver and tour guide in Philadelphia’s Old City. I took inquisitive international tourists, bored suburban school groups and tipsy wedding parties around the densest collection of colonial-era power centers in the United States.

One theme I always tried to land: Old City is unusual because it’s a historical national park within a living, breathing neighborhood. People live here. They work here. They shop for groceries here. It is not a dead thing sealed inside a museum.

That still matters to me. For the last decade, Technical.ly’s headquarters has been located right next to Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was first read aloud. I still walk and bicycle through these streets. I take coffee meetings and debate with friends.

That framing matters as the US enters its Semiquincentennial, which Technical.ly is marking by challenging all the ecosystems we cover to look toward the long-term future.

To get both the past and future right, the honest question of 2026 isn’t how we celebrate. It’s what we think we’re celebrating in the first place.

Revolution is not the same thing as war

Baltimore native and Harvard-trained historian Tad Stoermer has a forthcoming book, “A Resistance History of the United States,” and a prolific social presence that pushes a useful provocation: that it’s a misreading to believe the American system was inherently just but occasionally misapplied by bad actors.

The system, he suggests, has only bent toward justice because generations of people — labor organizers, abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights leaders, immigrants, entrepreneurs — fought relentlessly to force it there.

Stoermer and other historians make a critical distinction that often gets flattened in patriotic storytelling. The American Revolution is not the same thing as the Revolutionary War, nor even the Declaration of Independence. Those two were outcomes of the former. The revolution was the unfinished idea: liberty, self-rule and the ongoing, often brutal, struggle to broaden who counts in “We the people.”

Some of the American founders knew this at the time.

“The revolution was effected before the war commenced,” wrote John Adams in a now-famous 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson. “The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”

That distinction matters in 2026. Because if what we’re celebrating is a war won, the story is tidy and closed. If what we’re celebrating is a revolution of ideals, the story is ongoing, and demands participation. Organizing today can be as relevant today as ever, if it reinforces those ideas.

Tech and entrepreneurship as tools for change

I’ve never been interested in technology and entrepreneurship for their own sake. I’ve only ever cared about them as tools, tools that most Americans enthusiastically support. Technologies are accelerants. Entrepreneurship is applied invention. Neither is virtuous on its own.

What has always compelled me is their role in lowering barriers, in widening who gets a shot. The American spirit, at its best, is anti-incumbent. It resists entrenched power. It values experimentation over permission. That’s why economic mobility research fits so neatly with Technical.ly coverage. 

When the game feels open, people are willing to take risks. When it feels rigged, faith collapses. Americans broadly support entrepreneurship, but they are deeply dissatisfied when outcomes feel captured by insiders rather than earned through competition. This tension is not new. It is the story.

Resistance is the throughline

Jan. 10 marks the 250th anniversary of the printing of “Common Sense,” the 25,000-word pamphlet written by working-class radical Thomas Paine and published a short walk from Technical.ly HQ. It’s credited with further mainstreaming self-rule, and the idea that the people could demand more. 

Thoughtful historians remind us that the revolution didn’t begin with a sitting government. The organizers, the coffeehouse gatherings and the pamphleteers were residents, not rulers. Even the Continental Congress was made largely of people who were not professional politicians.

Stoermer pushes us away from hero worship and toward something harder: respecting ideals without pretending they were ever fully realized. Each generation’s resistance — formal or informal, inside institutions or outside them — is the American narrative. I’ve always liked the National Park Service’s interpretation of the Liberty Bell in Old City Philadelphia: situated in a modest structure, with artifacts from how the symbol was repurposed for resistance movements by abolitionists, suffragettes and gay rights activists, among others. 

The same logic applies to civic technology, to invention, to entrepreneurship at its best. Not pro-industry. Not pro-incumbent. Never complete. Ceaseless, distributed, creative, anti-authoritarian in spirit and relentlessly pragmatic about getting things done.

Whether meaningful change must happen inside systems or outside them remains a live political debate. But pretending resistance is unpatriotic misses the point entirely. Resistance is the tradition.

As our country celebrates 250 years, it’s also worth acknowledging that “America” has never been culturally singular. Nationhood Lab has spent years documenting long-standing regional and cultural differences, including influential work mapping distinct Indigenous and settler-rooted cultural regions that predate the United States itself.

This doesn’t weaken the American project. It clarifies it. We are not one story. We are many, negotiating shared rules amid real differences.

That’s why a recent call for a “Declaration of Interdependence” resonates. If independence defined the rupture of 1776, interdependence better describes the work ahead: reconciling pluralism, technology, mobility and democracy in a system that was never meant to be static.

So what are we celebrating?

In 2026, Americans are not celebrating perfection. We’re not celebrating inevitability. We’re celebrating a particularly memorable and meaningful year that helpfully represents the much-older American Revolution. That revolution was fought, with words and swords, to demand self-rule, more representation, more opportunity. Out with the old, in with the new. Look at today’s declining economic mobility and political dissatisfaction, I say it’s a worthwhile time to reflect.  

In my Old City tours, I preferred the daily-life stories of the American Revolution: marketplace negotiations, merchant and trade corridors, coffeehouse debates and slavery protests. Put the right way, all of it feels entirely familiar, of most people just trying to get by, weighing the imperfect system they knew with the uncertainty of a revolution. Sometimes I’d even get a teenager or groomsman to listen for a while.