If 2014 was a “Great Awokening,” then 2020 was the start of a second wave—a movement that’s led the entire nation to wrestle with questions around race, diversity, and our origin story.

But what will 2026—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—bring? Some hope it’ll be a time to celebrate and commemorate the American story. But others—including many influential organizations—stand in opposition, seeking instead to fundamentally transform Americans’ understanding of our history.

Foremost among these activist organizations is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, our “nation’s largest supporter of the arts and the humanities.”

In 2020, Mellon placed social justice at the center of its grant-making initiatives. Since then, it’s issued numerous and sizeable grants supporting anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ+ programs.

Notably, it gave $150,000 to the New-York Historical Society in 2021 to support a “Gender and LGBTQ+ History Fellow.” In 2023, that same society partnered with Colonial Williamsburg to host a teacher chat on “Queer History and Methodologies” and a workshop on “Best Practices for Teaching Queer History.” This course, open to educators from preschool to college level, was officially approved by New York state as qualifying toward public educators’ continuing education requirements.

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In 2023, the Mellon Foundation joined the Alice Walton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Pilot Philanthropy in a “Leadership in Art Museums” initiative that committed over “$11M in funding to museums to increase racial equity in leadership roles…” at museums.

This program is in addition to the National Park Service Mellon Humanities Fellowship,” which funds postdoctoral fellows at national parks to research “how the parks are impacted and/or informed by issues related to gender and sexuality equality, the legacy of the civil rights movement, and the history of labor and productivity.”

One of these fellows, placed at James Monroe’s Highlands (his home from 1799 to 1823), wrote that 2020 marked a “racial and social” reckoning at museums, which she described as “preservers of white supremacist versions of the past.”

In 2022, Mellon expanded this post-doctoral program, committing over $13 million for 30 new fellows at our national parks. Another Mellon fellow remarked that this program “has the potential to transform the stories told at many of the country’s national parks.”

Words like “transform” and “reimagine” are often indicators of post-modernist mischief.

For example, the Mellon Foundation has committed $500 million to transforming our nation’s monuments landscape, in part because it saw a lack of “U.S.-born Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+ people” in the list of top 50 individuals most frequently memorialized.

This sort of transformation seeks primarily to achieve equity of identity characteristics rather than recognition for meritorious deeds that all Americans can claim as part of our history. Ultimately, this approach favors inclusivity over accuracy.

As was previously noted, the Mellon Foundation has been partnering with the National Park Service on some of its initiatives. The National Park Service and Foundation are currently making changes to the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, to be completed by this spring and the 250th anniversary, respectively.

Work at the Jefferson Memorial will include “expanded and reimagined exhibit space” and “new state-of-the-art exhibits” that will provide “more perspectives as it shares Thomas Jefferson’s multi-faceted story.”

At the Lincoln Memorial, new exhibits “will highlight the construction history of the memorial and discuss how the Lincoln Memorial has become the nation’s foremost backdrop for civil rights demonstrations.”

Both of these efforts have been enabled by donations from philanthropist and businessman David M. Rubenstein, who funded the exhibits on slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier.

Americans can hope that the new exhibits at two of our foremost national memorials will be informative, balanced, and accurate. But the ones funded by Rubenstein at Montpelier are decidedly not.

There are currently no exhibits at Montpelier focused on James Madison and his contributions. And the ones on offer contain many distortions, “gotcha” efforts, and at least one factual error.

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This raises concerns for the memorials both of Thomas Jefferson, Madison’s close friend and ally in the cause for human freedom, and for Abraham Lincoln, who urged us to give all honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.

Today, a visible divide exists between those who want to commemorate our first 250 years of history and dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and those who want to transform and reject it.

In this moment, perhaps we should turn to Abraham Lincoln, who began his famous House Divided speech, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.”

Anniversaries are times to reflect, assess, and resolve a way forward. More, they are cause to celebrate, remember, and demonstrate gratitude.

America is indeed exceptional. This free country has granted us, its current posterity, the opportunity to continue in the work we are in, to prove to ourselves, and the world, that the noble ambition of a self-governing nation can indeed be kept.