Wednesday, July 15, 2026 – 4pm ET / 1pm PT
This July, the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document celebrated as the nation’s founding charter of freedom. Under the banners of “Freedom 250” and “America 250,” the Trump Administration and its private-sector partners are seizing the anniversary as an opportunity to advance an amnesiac view of the past: one grounded in the celebration of “American greatness” and the active erasure of the histories of racism, exploitation, enslavement, and settler-colonial dispossession that lay at the nation’s foundations.
This virtual roundtable will explore the contested terrain of the United States’ 250th birthday—and the counter-histories that can help us confront the authoritarian politics of the present. What vision of freedom is being celebrated in 2026? What histories cannot be accommodated by the official narrative? And what forms of public education, storytelling, and cultural work are needed to bring those histories into view?
Featuring Cherokee journalist and podcaster Rebecca Nagle, whose new podcast First America reinterprets the founding of the United States through an Indigenous lens; activist educator Jesse Hagopian, a leading voice in the struggle to defend and expand antiracist education; Beka Economopoulos, Director of The Natural History Museum, whose counter-atlas The Other 250 maps contested place names and the histories and struggles over land, memory, and power they reveal; and Derek Alderman, a cultural and historical geographer whose work focuses on commemorative activism and critical place-making, this roundtable will explore how the struggle over history is being waged across classrooms, curricula, podcasts, place names, museums, and public memory.
Together, the speakers will ask what it means to resist official commemoration at a time of authoritarian backlash—and how counter-histories of Indigenous sovereignty, Black freedom struggle, abolition, anticolonial resistance, and popular education can help orient our struggles for justice and freedom in the years ahead.
SPEAKERS
Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee) is an award-winning journalist and citizen of Cherokee Nation. Nagle’s debut book, By The Fire We Carry: the Generations-long Fight for Justice on Native Land (2024) was an instant national bestseller, a New Yorker Book of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize and numerous other awards. Nagle is also the writer and host of the podcasts This Land and First America. First America unveils how the founding fathers’ treatment of Indigenous Nations–and their resistance–shaped US democracy, revealing how our current political moment was 250 years in the making.
Jesse Hagopian is a classroom teacher, curriculum builder, cultural thought leader, mentor, and organizer working to center student voices and reimagine what education and schools can be. He teaches Ethnic Studies at Seattle’s Garfield High School—his alma mater and the site of the historic 2013 MAP test boycott—and serves as an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine. Jesse is the author of Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School, Teaching for Black Lives, Teaching Palestine, and Teachers Unions and Social Justice, and editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. He also directs the Teaching for Black Lives campaign with the Zinn Education Project and founded the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award to support youth leadership in Seattle.
Derek H. Alderman is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A past President of the American Association of Geographers, co-founder of Tourism RESET, and former member of the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee on Place Name Reconciliation, he has partnered with civil rights organizations, nonprofits, museums, journalists, and city governments to advance the inclusion of historically marginalized experiences, especially African American histories, in public memorial spaces. He is (co)author of Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (2008), and Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum (2022), along with more than 200 articles, chapters, and public-facing essays.
Beka Economopoulos has been an organizing director, communications consultant, and cultural strategist for more than 25 years. She is a co-founder of Not An Alternative (2004–), a nonprofit art and social justice collective, and Director of the group’s ongoing project, The Natural History Museum (2014–), a touring “museum for the movement.” Beka was a Board Member of the 2017 March for Science, a 2018 Roddenberry Fellow, a 2020 recipient of a Creative Capital award, one of Grist magazine’s top fifty environmental leaders of 2020, and a 2023 recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art award.
This is a Words Are Monuments event produced by The Natural History Museum. Made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation and 4culture.
