That’s a big word in the title: semiquincentennial. Let’s break it down.
Semi
= half
Quin
= five
Cent
= hundred
Ennial=
year (same root as annual)
So we’re in the year of half of five hundred years. That
equals 250. We’re talking of course about the 250th birthday of the
United States of America. The specific birthday will be on July 4th.
That is the day we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence,
declaring us a separate nation from Great Britain, the colonizing mother
country. There was a war underway at the time of the signing, originally to
regain rights that had been violated, but by this time it was to win
independence. And we won. Otherwise the signers would have been hanged for
treason.
Most nations are born out of a people: an ethnicity or language or culture. Sometimes they break off from other existing nations. Sometimes—easier in previous times—they found an uninhabited frontier and settled there, thus creating a new nation.
The United States of America was born out of an idea. As
Abraham Lincoln recounted it nearly a century later, America was “conceived in
liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This
was different from all men are born into their strata of society, with
higher-born people getting power and other advantages not afforded to the
lower-born layers of people.
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