Felicia Gabriele
The expression, “Might you reside in attention-grabbing occasions,” appears on its face, nice sufficient. Resembling a well-wish, its sunny exterior deftly cloaks the darkish, cavernous depths inside. To reside in attention-grabbing occasions, is kind of merely, to be cursed.
To show American Historical past in attention-grabbing occasions, is, effectively… akin to having a staring contest with the evilest of evil eyes. I ought to know. I train American Historical past at McGill College. The day after Donald Trump gained the presidential election in November 2024, heartbroken and numb, there was nonetheless a lecture to offer, emails to reply, espresso to drink. Educating American Historical past in America’s 51st state is difficult work in spite of everything!
“All Males Are Created Equal?” April 2026 (Shared with scholar permission)
Resulting from its location and comparatively decrease tuition, McGill attracts a considerable quantity of American undergraduates, a lot of whom enroll in my historical past courses.
I’ve misplaced depend of the occasions American college students have informed me they realized extra of their very own historical past in my courses than again dwelling. Sadly, dwelling in attention-grabbing occasions means dwelling concurrently with the sanitization of historic truths; wholescale erasure of historical past and different topics deemed too “woke”; and the unmistakable death-rattle of educational freedom. Whereas Canada is actually not excellent, at the least professors aren’t compelled by legislation to show blatant untruths similar to slavery “benefitted” Black Individuals.
With that in thoughts, I launched a brand new task in my Early America survey: the America @ 250 Undertaking. I requested college students to replicate on the next questions:
- What do the important thing concepts, values, and guarantees represented within the Declaration of Independence imply to you? What do you suppose they meant to Individuals in 1776? To Individuals in 2026?
- How are you considering and feeling about this event? How would you start to precise or articulate what America @ 250 means to you?
- How would you start to judge and assess the state of America @ 250?
- What do you hope for America’s future? Take into consideration what you hope America can obtain and the way collectively we (the individuals) may help make it a actuality.
To reply these questions, I gave college students two choices:
Possibility #1: Write an Op-Ed to make an argument about America @ 250 by connecting a present-day challenge to a historic matter, theme, or occasion associated to our class.
Possibility #2: Make a Artistic Undertaking within the type of an analog or computer-generated PowerPoint presentation, poster, collage, scrapbook, picture album, video montage, and so forth. that reveals how you’re envisioning America 250 years in. Together with your creation, submit a brief reflection piece explaining your inventive imaginative and prescient.
Whereas inconceivable to share every mission, I embrace right here some really extraordinary America @ 250 initiatives.
When Artwork Imitates Life
Separated by centuries, and numerous miracles together with indoor plumbing, the invention of penicillin, industrial air journey, The Actual Housewives, and Katy Perry’s ascension to outer house, 1700s America and 2020s America couldn’t be additional aside. However as historians, we all know higher. Then, like now, America is as polarized and divided as ever earlier than. This comes as no shock to Ken Burns, prolific documentarian of the American expertise. In a dialog on NPR’s Contemporary Air, whereas selling his 2025 documentary, The American Revolution, he notes, “We’ve all the time been divided. I don’t know for those who can take consolation from it, given the present state of affairs. However I do imagine that the historian’s perspective is one that lets you perceive, as Ecclesiastes says, there’s nothing new underneath the solar.” That is one thing my college students completely picked up on, with the astounding readability and storytelling chops that Burns himself may solely marvel at.
One scholar specifically, intentionally used the medium of portray to attract parallels between the historic then and ever-unfolding now.
Left: Paul Revere Jr., after Henry Pelham, The Boston Bloodbath, 1770, Metropolitan Museum of Artwork
Proper: Paul Revere II, The Boston Bloodbath, 1770, engraving, High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco
For her artistic mission, aptly titled America 250: Historical past Repeats, it was necessary for this student- artist’s work to be in dialog with arguably probably the most viral engraving of the 18th century, Paul Revere’s The Bloody Bloodbath. One which, in her phrases, operates as a “nationalistic image,” ubiquitous in each the American cultural creativeness and “in fashionable American textbooks as a major reference of the oppression the colonists confronted and a significant motive for why the revolution was essential to safeguard freedom.”
America 250: Historical past Repeats, April 2026 (Shared with scholar permission)
Revere’s unique engraving captures the grim actuality of life throughout a army occupation. “Stationing armed forces in a location has by no means been a impartial determination,” writes the student-artist in her accompanying written reflection. She accurately notes that occupying forces “aren’t topic to the identical legal guidelines everybody else should comply with. Wherever a military goes concern and violence arises and the liberty of everyone seems to be in danger.” That is precisely what occurred in Boston that horrible day in March of 1770 and is precisely what we’re seeing in the present day in majority Democrat cities throughout the US.
“As an alternative of colonists and British troopers, my scene depicts a contemporary crowd going through armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers,” the student-artist writes. In contrast to the British troopers, the ICE brokers are cloaked in unconstitutional anonymity.
Word the stylistic similarities between the 2 scenes. Within the latter, look intently to the place the pink arrows level to the “ICE” lettering emblazoned on the backs of the brokers’ inexperienced vests.
Revere’s engraving options primarily white figures, besides Crispus Attucks (left). In distinction, by putting the Black man within the forefront of the scene, the student-artist gestures to the lengthy historical past of deadly police violence in direction of Black and POC Individuals.
Utilizing language of “self-defense” the British military tried to spin the occasions of the Boston Bloodbath. “That is remarkably much like how the Republican get together has framed the murders ICE have dedicated as having been provoked, and due to this fact justified,” notes our student-artist. Responding to the homicide of Renee Good, Vice President JD Vance blamed Good for her personal demise, calling her a “home terrorist” . Senior Trump officers defended the ICE officer for “appearing in self-defense.” Not lengthy after, ICE murdered Alex Pretti, and the identical officers spewed the identical hateful narrative, declaring Pretti a “home terrorist” and branding him an “murderer” whose sole goal was to “homicide federal brokers.”
College students overwhelmingly responded to the ICE occupations and immigration raids taking place in actual time. All of us watched in horror as ICE officers gleefully and shamelessly ramped up their deportation ways, showcasing the stunning depths of cruelty and inhumanity they appeared very happy to plumb. College students pointed to the express racial profiling, abductions, mass arrests, the focusing on of fogeys and younger kids, and the seemingly unending warehousing of our bodies deemed too “alien”, “unlawful”, “harmful”.
All Males Are Created Equal?
One scholar occurred to be in Minneapolis whereas finishing her task. Her op-ed, “America at 250 Years: Equality Was All the time Conditional, and Nonetheless Is” captures the second, with all of the searing depth you’d anticipate. On the coronary heart of her op-ed is the difficulty of racial profiling and belonging: “In impact, individuals of color should continuously show their proper to exist freely in public, whereas others who share resemblance to the founding fathers, are by no means questioned in any respect.” Her op-ed was one among many assignments the place college students questioned, challenged, and systematically picked aside the threads of what ought to supposedly be self-evident, that every one males are created equal. And so they did so in such artistic methods!
Take, for example, the collage above which poses the query, “All Males Are Created Equal”? “The one factor that has actually caught in my mind from each what we realized on this class and the information is the bloodshed, violence, and inequality our nation is constructed upon,” this student-artist writes in her accompanying written reflection.
She purposefully populates the ‘2’ and ‘5’ with pictures of slavery, colonialism, and the violent destruction of Indigenous individuals to indicate that the “all males” class has all the time been, and maybe all the time might be, exclusionary to its very core.
The ultimate ‘0’ is supposed to indicate that we in 2026 aren’t inherently superior to these in 1776. Within the phrases of the coed who wrote her op-ed in Minneapolis, “If america is to maneuver ahead, it should do greater than have a good time its founding phrases; it should redefine them. Equality can not stay conditional whether it is to have which means within the subsequent 250 years.”
One other mission that contended with the conditional “all males are created equal” got here within the type of a brief movie showcasing the resilience and richness of Black historical past and tradition. Right here’s how the student-auteur describes his imaginative and prescient, “this mission frames Black historical past not as a linear or marginal narrative, however as one of the revealing vantage factors from which to grasp each the failures of the American “experiment” and its most profound capacities for resistance, creativity, and civic transformation, capacities that echo the nation’s founding rhetoric even the place its establishments have persistently betrayed it.”
Utilizing a wealthy array of “fastidiously curated, expressionistic collage of pictures and pictures” and set to Tupac’s “Do For Love,” this movie goals “to light up main developments within the evolution of Black America and its place throughout the bigger American narrative.”
I used to be blown away by the artistry of this movie. The scholar-auteur’s rationale for the tune choice was particularly shifting: “[it] felt tremendously becoming as a result of its longing and vulnerability echo the movie’s focus on the pursuit of recognition, belonging, and dignity inside a nation that has so usually withheld all three.” Like several necessary anniversary or milestone, we carry out the celebratory glass-clinking merriment the event requires, however deep down, we all know higher. We proceed to reside within the shadows of what as soon as was, what may have been, lives reduce quick, desires deferred, unspeakable grief, infinite longing. America’s semiquincentennial isn’t any totally different.
Freedom Motherfucker, April 2026 (Shared with scholar permission)
Whereas many college students grappled with lofty phrases and beliefs, others explored the nakedly self-interested, greedy, genocidal impulse of American expansionism. For instance, the student-artist’s work above satirizes the (literal) weaponization of American “freedom.” He notes in his reflection piece, “Each occasion of projecting American energy over historical past has been accomplished with false intentions, to not carry freedom and liberty just like the Declaration of Independence says, however to assert assets, whether or not it’s land, gold, oil, or uncommon earth metals.”
By connecting the harmful perception in “Manifest Future” to the American obsession with westward growth and the Frontier mythos, this student-artist factors to the violence and greed on the basis of the so-called “Land of the Free.” The poster options portraits of presidents with imperialist agendas, James Okay. Polk, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Donald Trump. Within the backside proper nook, we see Greenland, strategically positioned beside the central determine in John Gast’s 1872 portray “American Progress”. Extremely clear-eyed, the student-artist states the apparent, “America is not going to carry “freedom” to Greenland; as a substitute, they may extract uncommon earth metals from wealthy deposits.” On this depiction of America @ 250, the nation’s founding beliefs act as mere window-dressing for the primary occasion: useful resource extraction.
You’re Cordially Invited
Talking of the primary occasion…
2026 Invitation (All invites shared with scholar permission)
One scholar even conceptualized her America @ 250 mission as a sequence of invites. “The phrase that impressed this mission is “Who’s Invited to the Social gathering?” This concept led me to design a sequence of invites: one for Independence Day and others for every semi-centennial anniversary, ending in 2026,” she wrote in her reflection piece.
1976 Invitation 1926 Invitation
This student-graphic designer modelled her invitation designs on quite a lot of major sources from every period, capturing the historic temper, tone, and aesthetic of every. Crucially, she notes, “Every invitation identifies who was “welcome” and “unwelcome,” thus highlighting how American liberty has all the time been inconsistently distributed, granting freedom to some whereas excluding or oppressing others.”
1876 Invitation 1826 Invitation
Themes of conditional belonging and who “counts” as American take centre-stage . Or as our student-graphic designer factors out, “By means of inspecting every semi-centennial anniversary, this mission reveals that American liberty has by no means been mounted or assured, regardless of it making up the core motif of nationwide rhetoric.”
Echoing the earlier phrases of her scholar colleagues, she writes, “Whereas the nation has constantly celebrated beliefs of freedom since 1776, entry to these beliefs has been uneven and exclusionary.”
The OG, 1776 invitation
“By reframing these anniversaries by the query of “who’s invited to the get together,” I try to explain the historical past by which American freedom has usually been the exception versus the rule,” the student-graphic designer writes.
As with prior examples, I stay in awe of the creativity, creativeness, and nice effort that went into this mission! One remaining line from our student-designer: “I hope that bringing consideration to this may proceed to focus on that the battle for, and dialogue round, freedom and liberty are simply as related in the present day as they had been 250 years in the past.”
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In our attention-grabbing occasions of compliance prematurely and bending the knee to authoritarian agendas, my pedagogical observe is rooted in transgression. The classroom, bell hooks writes in Educating to Transgress, is “probably the most radical house of chance within the academy.” I couldn’t agree extra.
What felt particularly radical was what number of college students opted to make one thing. Maybe within the age of AI, our position as educators is to equip our college students with the braveness essential to create bizarre, messy, and flawed works in an more and more frictionless, surface-obsessed world. We could certainly reside in attention-grabbing occasions, however we should not lose sight of how really attention-grabbing, courageous, and sensible our college students may be.
Felicia Gabriele is a historian, author, and educator primarily based in Montreal. Her public scholarship has appeared in Maisonneuve, Electrical Literature, The Rambling, and elsewhere. Yow will discover her on Bluesky @feliciagabriele.bsky.social
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