Video and Audio
A United States but a Divided America: How We have Celebrated the Nation’s Birthday During Turbulent Times
On February 26, 2026, the Georgia Historical Society presented "A United States but a Divided America: How We have Celebrated the Nation’s Birthday During Turbulent Times," a discussion with historians Dr. William Hitchcock, James Madison Professor of History at the University of Virginia and expert on the Cold War, and Dr. Elizabeth Varon, Professor of History and Associate Director of the Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA, about past national commemorations.
The United States will commemorate its 250th anniversary during one of the most partisan periods in American history. Once again, our national commemoration will take place during a divisive era—much like the centennial of 1876 followed the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the bicentennial of 1976 followed the tumultuous 1960s, Vietnam, and Watergate, all in the midst of the Cold War. How did those two earlier critical and pivotal events—the Civil War and the Cold War—shape those commemorations and what can we learn from the leadership of those who steered the American ship of state through the political, social, and economic upheaval and vicious partisanship of those divisive eras?
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About William Hitchcock
William I. Hitchcock is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning teacher who has published numerous books relating to World War II, including The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association. He is also the author of The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. He received his B.A. degree from Kenyon College and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He has been a Fulbright scholar, a fellow of the Nobel Institute in Oslo, the holder of the Henry Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress, and Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is now the James Madison Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
About Elizabeth Varon
Elizabeth R. Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and a member of the executive council of UVA’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. She is the author of six books, including Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, which won the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Her most recent book Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) was reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. The book won the inaugural American Battlefield Trust Prize, the Georgia Historical Society’s Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times biography prize, among other honors. Varon’s current project is a biography of humanitarian Clara Barton.