President Donald Trump has scheduled a “grand” semiquincentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 as part of his executive order calling for “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.”

Worthy of salutation are not only the astonishing events of the year 1776 but also the 250 subsequent years of cultural accomplishments by too-oft underappreciated American artists, authors, architects, and composers who together have constructed a distinctive civilization worthy of its founders. What is “unifying, inspiring, and ennobling” about the United States of America goes beyond any one year, however memorable.

The president’s call for celebration provides an opportunity for a more enduring form of civic education than that provided by boring civics texts manufactured by corporations more interested in nationwide sales than national pride. Appreciation of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” is better inculcated by retelling, reenacting, re-singing, and re-recognizing the country’s cultural heritage than by drilling students in dull civics classes required by state laws.

A celebration of artistic accomplishment offsets the legend of the “ugly American,”—that insufferable, culturally backward, artistically insensitive, monolingual, flamboyantly clad species, a myth as prevalent today as when used as a title for a book released in 1958.

Then and now, sophisticated Americans blush at the thought of American culture. The United States has no ancient pyramids, no Taj Mahal, no Angkor Wat, no Notre Dame Cathedral, no Chinese wall, no Japanese rock garden, no Parthenon nor Colosseum. This nation is too young for such antiquities, though geology has favored it with extraordinary landscapes.

The country’s literature is also young and just short of the great classics of Western Civilization. But if the new world cannot lay claim to anything quite like Homer, Shakespeare, or Tolstoy, literate Americans, to understand themselves, need to familiarize themselves with James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. To celebrate these and a multitude of other superb American authors, high school and college teachers should encourage students to read privately and aloud their poems and plays, to discuss and ponder their book-length novels.

Universities should lead the patriotic parade in 2026. Currently, English departments are sacrificing the best in our heritage to trendy pieces on space travel, climate change, political conspiracies, and gender modification. Will 2026 be the year classrooms return to the American classic?

When it comes to theater and film, the celebration should not expect much help from America’s largest and most powerful international corporations. They have strong incentives to launch products that sell worldwide. What Hollywood and New York consider “honest and ennobling” is not likely to have an American identity. Today’s stage and film features animated robots, exotic animals, and creatures from outer space.

But if little help can be expected from the profit-making sector, high school and community stages in 2026 should give students, parents, and citizens the chance to enjoy the plays of Lillian Hellman, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson. Nor should we forget the American musical, a genuinely homegrown literary product. To sing along with Showboat, Oklahoma!, and Hamilton is a lesson in civics that can be recalled for a lifetime.

One need not live in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C., to see great American art. Among many other alternatives, walk through all three buildings of the great American museum, Crystal Bridges, near Fayetteville, Arkansas. Or the respected assemblies of art and sculpture in Detroit, Milwaukee, and San Francisco. Or travel to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, or to Phoenix, Arizona, to see the Heard Museum’s marvelous indigenous American collection, including its proud collection of native American dolls assembled by Barry Goldwater.

Another of Trump’s executive orders says new “federal public buildings” should be “visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage” so that they “beautify public spaces and ennoble . . . our system of self-government.” That declaration should win undying applause from those who spend more than a day seeing the sights in the District of Columbia. The old State Department building adjacent to the White House, the bizarre but still noble steeple-without-a-palace monument in honor of George Washington, and the Capitol Building itself are worthy of awesome accolades. But apart from memorials to Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Vietnam War, visitors otherwise encounter relentless avenues of faceless, rectangular, design-free, concrete slabs. The forbidding exteriors of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation look like defenders of the Deep State they are said to be. The Federal Reserve and Department of State reside in massive monstrosities. The entrance to the U.S. Department of Education is so ill-defined that it was artificially jazzed up with a cheap, temporary, gaudy portico.

Still, buildings across the country allow for celebration of America the beautiful. The Brooklyn view of the New York skyline, with the Statue of Liberty holding her torch in the distance, is unforgettable. Viewed from the shore of Lake Michigan, Chicago’s skyline is no less breathtaking. St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Seattle’s Space Needle, and Boston’s Custom House Tower each define the city they grace.

American orchestras rank among the world’s greatest. Who can deny the extraordinarily sound produced by the Boston and Chicago symphonies, the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, the New York and Los Angeles philharmonic orchestras, and musicians across the country. But, I fear, they mostly play either Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, or Mozart, Mahler, and Mussorgsky. American composers Bernstein, Copland, Ives, and Price seldom make the cut. Even more American—if such a phrase may be permitted—are the blues, bluegrass, Cajun, country, gospel, jazz, and soul traditions that form the wellspring of the nation’s contributions to classical music. Now that Trump and his friends have taken charge of the Kennedy Center in Washington, they could do worse than to give these and other folk traditions their moment of recognition in 2026.

Celebrate Americana from January to December in 2026. Let’s not confine it to July 4, nor focus solely on 1776, great as that year was. Civic patriotism is best promoted by honoring the noblest the country has offered for two and a half centuries.

This post originally appeared on The Modern Federalist Substack.

Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He welcomes your reactions to this post by email at paul.peterson@educationnext.org; responses will be curated and shared periodically. His Education Exchange podcast is available with a new episode each Monday.