In Cumberland, Maryland, on a day of flags and patriotic T-shirts, Melinda Kelleher, the town’s Main Street manager, did not let the question finish. Asked whether organising an ‘America 250’ parade in a liberal-leaning Appalachian town had been a challenge ‘in these divisive times’, she replied ‘Yes’ before the sentence was out. The parade, she said, was deliberately stitched to pull a fractured community together, part of a revitalisation that has brought 30 new shops to the downtown. Nearby, Al Fieldstein, a retired government employee and amateur historian in his 70s, recalled watching the same route as a boy, when the last veterans of the First World War still marched. ‘They’re all gone now,’ he said, glancing at the children playing near his feet.

Several hundred miles to the north-east, the historian Anthony Cohen was putting one foot in front of the other on a very different commemoration. His ‘Freedom Walk’, a 750-mile retracing of an Underground Railroad route from Sandy Spring, Maryland, to Toronto, aimed to bring a buried stratum of American history into the anniversary’s light. Cohen was accompanied by a travelling bronze of Harriet Tubman and by Tom DeWolf, a white descendant of the nation’s largest slave-trading family. DeWolf recounted the invitation: ‘He said, “White people, White people helped.” And then he said, “You can write a new legacy for your family.”’ The walk, scheduled to cross into Canada on 1 July and reach Toronto on the Fourth, deliberately stretched the geography of the national story.

The anniversary has prompted cultural institutions to probe the foundational tension between ideals and realities. In New York, the Jewish Museum’s ‘Circa 1776’ exhibit features the 1790 correspondence between George Washington and Moses Seixas of Touro Synagogue, a touchstone of religious freedom that resonates as 77% of Americans tell pollsters the founders would be disappointed in today’s union. A new NBC News survey captured what citizens themselves see as the nation’s greatest achievements: nearly two-thirds named the expansion of rights—the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights legislation—while others pointed to victory in the Second World War or the moon landing. The responses sketch a public that locates greatness not in monuments but in the slow, contested work of widening the circle of ‘We the People’.

Yet the centrepiece of the federal semiquincentennial, President Donald Trump’s ‘Great American State Fair’ on the National Mall, has unfolded under the pall of sparse crowds, technical mishaps and political acrimony. By the weekend, photographs showed a musician performing at a Christian tent to two seated listeners, while a 110-foot Ferris wheel stood idle after power outages and West Virginia’s booth closed its air conditioning. Six states, including Pennsylvania and Oregon, declined to send official delegations, citing budgets or concerns the event had become a partisan vehicle. Country singer Martina McBride pulled out, saying she had agreed to a nonpartisan event, not one that was ‘misleading’. In a tent dedicated to the Future Farmers of America, a 15-year-old named Piper Stolipher stood with a heifer she had named Melania, explaining that ‘the hair colours kind of match’.

Away from the capital, the President planned to appear on 3 July at Mount Rushmore, the colossal granite carving of four presidents that the sculptor Gutzon Borglum called a ‘Shrine of Democracy’. But the monument’s shadow is long. At the visitor centre, a quiet ethnobotanical garden laid out by the National Park Service botanist Rylan Sprague marks a different geometry: its stone-divided beds point not to presidential faces but to sacred sites in the Black Hills, a range the Lakota consider the centre of the world. As a little boy raced up the steps shouting, ‘Papa, komm!’, most visitors walked past the small circular garden, where sage and buffalo grass grow—a reminder that the ground on which the nation’s symbols are carved was never empty.