Good morning. Like yesterday, today’s newsletter is a special edition featuring highlights from our 250th anniversary coverage.
But — as you no doubt heard — Taylor Swift got married yesterday! So that’s where we’ll start.
It’s a love story
What better way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday than with our own royal wedding? Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tied the knot at Madison Square Garden last night, amid a constellation of stars from the worlds of music, sports and Hollywood. Swift’s brother, Austin, served as “man of honor” and Jason Kelce, the groom’s brother, as best man. Adam Sandler officiated.
Roughly 1,000 guests were expected to attend. Bradley Cooper and Gigi Hadid were there, as were Selena Gomez, Reese Witherspoon and Dakota Johnson; Hugh Grant, Ethan Hawke, Mariska Hargitay and Jason Sudeikis; Ed Sheeran, Sombr, the Chicks and Benson Boone. Here’s a longer guest list.
Crowds of Swifties braved the sweltering Manhattan heat to stand along the metal barricades outside the arena. Mamie Borres, a teacher from Alexandria, Va., said she had come to offer “moral support for Swift,” adding, “I hope she’ll be happy forever.” Many chanted “windows down” as vehicles whisked celebrities away in the wee hours; by 4 a.m., the police had begun removing the barricades. See photos of the crowds.
While details of the wedding plans leaked out over the past week, little emerged from the celebration itself. Swift and Kelce wore Dior, the fashion house announced, though no photos of their outfits have been released. Stevie Nicks was expected to perform, and there were rumors that Paul McCartney and Swift herself would also play.
For more on the wedding festivities, read our blog.
The city of Presque Isle, Maine, was founded in 1828, about a half-century after the country. It has about 8,000 residents, a tiny fraction of the nation’s 340 million.
Presque Isle started its celebration of this semiquincentennial less than two weeks into 2026, with a free lecture on Margaret Corbin, the first American woman to earn a military pension. Since then, there has been a Betsy Ross impersonator at a downtown hotel; a reading of Longfellow’s Paul Revere poem at the library; an exhibition on the history of the American flag at the hospital; demonstrations of 18th-century children’s games; a teaching demonstration in a one-room schoolhouse; a Zoom class for older residents on the Penobscot Expedition of 1779; and a show of semiquincentennial-inspired art.
And there’s a lot more to come: September promises a quill-making workshop with real bird feathers and a cider-pressing demonstration where the high school band will play colonial tunes.
This is largely the work of one intrepid and very patriotic woman: Kim Smith, the city’s grants writer and public information officer, who is 68 and doesn’t do anything halfway.
“A quarter of a millennium felt too significant to cram into a day or a week,” Smith told me.
Please read my story. We’ve made the link free for you, along with all the other 250th anniversary stories in this newsletter, so long as you log in.
ON THE PLATE: 1830s
‘Mississippi Goddam’
The year was 1964. The stage was Carnegie Hall. The audience was mostly white. And there was Nina Simone, belting her first original protest song of the civil rights era, what our critic Wesley Morris calls a “bulletin of exasperated fury.”
The lyrics tick through “a miniature yet monolithic history of stalled achievements,” Wesley writes. “The longer the country held out for justice, the worse things got for the people kept waiting. That leisurely pace would lead only to more murder, and more assassinations.”
Simone is desperate, frustrated, out of answers. “Why don’t you see it,” she begs. The images of firehoses and fire bombings are in the news, on television. It’s a rhetorical plea that’s damning enough.
But then she asks, “Why don’t you feel it,” which has always been the question in these moral crises. Where is the empathy, where are your hearts, let alone your eyes?
Click here to read Wesley’s full analysis of the song, hear clips from that Carnegie Hall performance and explore five other sentences that shaped America’s story.
UNKNOWN FOUNDERS
The ‘patriot housewife’
The American Revolution was a war of the pen as much as a war of the sword, writes Kathleen DuVal, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
One example was a play called “The Adulateur,” published anonymously in a Massachusetts newspaper in 1772. A despot named Rapatio plots to enslave the people in a free society — a thinly veiled reference to the colonial governor’s oppression through taxation.
Readers likely presumed the play, like most of what appeared in newspapers at the time, was written by a man. In fact, its author was Mercy Otis Warren, a housewife in Plymouth, whose family had a personal beef with the governor.
In 1774, Warren’s praise of the Boston Tea Party ran on the front page of the Boston Gazette. The next year, her play “The Group” was reprinted in newspapers in New York City and Philadelphia.
Warren helped lay the groundwork for the Revolution “by framing the conflict in stirring, dramatic terms,” DuVal writes. “She captivated the reading public by elevating their personal grievances with British rule by using classical tropes and symbolic language.”
Read more about Warren and the other unknown founders.
OPINIONS
What are we celebrating? Sixteen New York Times columnists and contributors picked one moment that represents the best the country can be. For Tom Friedman, it’s our unofficial anthem, “America the Beautiful.” Tressie McMillan Cottom admires the public libraries. Nicholas Kristof: public lands. Musical theater (John McWhorter); baseball, football and basketball (Ross Douthat); our “sunny, generous confidence” (Bret Stephens); “our righteous anger” (M. Gessen). See more, and see why.
TODAY’S NUMBER
200
— That’s about how many copies of the Declaration of Independence John Dunlaps’s Philadelphia print shop made overnight on July 4, 1776. The declaration spread further through newspapers and single-sheet printings called broadsides. There are a handful of copies whose origins are unknown because they were not signed by a printer. One is on display through tomorrow at the New York Historical. Explore its back story.
CONTESTED LEGACIES
The Minuteman
There’s a memorial near the Old North Bridge in Concord, Mass., that shows a man dropping his plow and picking up a musket. That mythical image of the citizen-soldier who fired the “shot heard round the world” to begin the war of independence has appeared on coins, stamps, sports logos and, since the 1950s, the official seal of the National Guard. The Eisenhower administration created the Minuteman missile program to respond to a potential Soviet strike.
But the figure has also been claimed by right-wing militia movements. In the early 1960s, some Midwestern hunters founded the Minutemen, an armed group that raised the possibility of “guerrilla war” against the government. In 2004, the Minuteman Project created Neighborhood Watch-style patrols along the Mexican border to stop migrants from crossing.
The classic image “is a wonderful symbol,” said Robert A. Gross, a historian and author of “The Minutemen and Their World.” “But it’s also a myth that is detached from social context and political organization.” — Jennifer Schuessler
Read about seven other Americans whose legacies are contested.
REVOLUTIONARY JOURNEYS
7 bars as old as America
After long days of fighting or writing, the Founders had to drink, right? Their taverns were more than just places to get a mug of beer — they were community centers where you could catch up on the latest news from afar. Our Liza Weisstuch visited a few that are still standing:
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Warren Tavern, in Boston’s Charlestown section, where you can reliably find sports on TV and toddlers on iPads during Sunday brunch. A good place for a Sam Adams.
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The ’76 House, in Tappan, N.Y., serves the ’76 House Tavern Ale, brewed from George Washington’s recipe. You can take a selfie with one of the period muskets behind the host stand.
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The Tap Room at the Griswold Inn in Connecticut was built as a schoolhouse in 1738. It was moved, via oxen and logs, to its current location in 1801. Grab a table in the Gun Room, where a glass case displays the barrel of a rifle and a handwritten note from a soldier: “My dearest son Jared,” it reads. “I send you this my gun, do not handle it in fun.”
Read about the rest of the taverns on Lisa’s list here.
THE 250th QUIZ
This question comes from a recent article in The Times. Click an answer to see if you’re right.
To celebrate America’s birthday, the Trump administration has spent $14 million on traveling museums called “Freedom Trucks.” Inside, visitors can view a “Wall of American Heroes.” There are 51 portraits, including:
