A number of activities are in the works locally to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
One of the first was held Wednesday at Allen Community College, where a crowd of about 30 was treated to a special preview of the Ken Burns documentary “The American Revolution,” which premieres Sunday on PBS. The subsequent installments on the six-episode series will follow Monday through Friday.
The preview was followed by a panel discussion with Allen instructors Jon Wells and Steven Dodson and Allen County Historical Society Director Kurtis Russell about the country’s origins.
Also partnering with the group was the Kansas 250 Commission.
Wells said he begins each of his American government classes with a discussion on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution because of how they fundamentally established the country’s ideals of life, liberty, property and equality.
The rest of American politics has been trying to define, or redefine those ideals over the past two-plus centuries, Wells noted.
In an ironic twist, Wells noted that the famed Boston Tea Party, where rebels dumped loads of tea in the Boston harbor to protest taxation without representation, was that the taxation actually lowered the price of tea in the colonies.
“The problem with the tea tax was that it was going to allow British merchants to essentially undercut local producers.”
The Articles of Confederation, the precursor to the Constitution, were ratified as a means to protect the colonies’ middle class.
Those who suffered wound up losing their livelihoods, and their properties. And without property, they in turn lost other rights.
“If we look at where the Revolution started, it was in cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia,” Wells said, “all major trade ports.”
DODSON, meanwhile, noted how the American Revolution followed what was best described as the Age of Enlightenment, which emphasized a natural skepticism of traditional authority.
“It largely came out of Europe, and it had an immense impact on the colonies,” Dodson noted. “We’re setting the precedent for this whole commitment of freedom, that we’re fundamentally free by God through nature.”
God’s influence cannot be ignored, Dodson continued, noting that 80% of the American public at the time of the Revolution was Christian.
“I think that’s very important to recognize, whether that’s right, wrong, good, bad, or indifferent, that Christian ethics and Christianity had an immense impact on how we viewed things,” he said. “The idea being that we were fighting for our freedom, but we had an ethical commitment to do what was best then for this new nation that we’re establishing.
“That doesn’t mean that we were always ethical in the process of building this country,” he quickly added. “I don’t think there’s anything more unethical than war. The idea, though, was that it would take a war to build this country, to get this country started.”
