As the U.S. prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, we review the nation's last big birthday celebration, 50 years ago: the Bicentennial.

The nation's 250th anniversary is just days away. And I was wondering, since I wasn't around in 1976, what it was like the last time the U.S. held a big old birthday party. Well, NPR sounded like this.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: A sworn deposition from former President Richard Nixon - the subject, what Nixon knew about wiretaps.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Hubert Humphrey has told President Ford that continued high unemployment is not necessary to control inflation.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Leonid Brezhnev yesterday accused the United States of foot-dragging in talks on a nuclear arms treaty.

RASCOE: Elsewhere on the radio, Paul McCartney and Wings were burning up the charts.

WINGS: (Singing) You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs.

RASCOE: And in movie theaters, people were scaring themselves to death with "The Omen."

HOLLY PALANCE: (As nanny) Look at me, Damien. It's all for you.

PHYLLIS JONES: It was a lot going on that year. I was a senior at J.F. Webb High School in Oxford, North Carolina. We were proud because we were graduating on the bicentennial. The rest of y'all won't be.

That's my mom, Phyllis Jones, and she should be proud. But I was surprised when she shared some of her memories. Like, a constitutional crisis, inflation, Damien - weren't the 70s a bit of a mess?

JONES: Well, see, you got to remember, we were children, so we saw all of that, heard all of that, but it didn't affect us. During that time, we were excited and proud to be Americans. We thought that America was the best place ever to live.

RASCOE: And it's not just my mom saying that, as my colleagues Danny Hensel and Melissa Gray found out when they talked to people on the National Mall here in Washington about the bicentennial.

DEBRA PIERRE: It was a good time. It was a happy time in my life.

MICHAEL ELLIS: A lot of picnics that summer, yeah.

I'm Michael Ellis (ph) from Marquette, Michigan.

PIERRE: Debra Pierre (ph) from Marquette, Michigan.

Seeing fireworks for the bicentennial were amazing. (Laughter) It was...

ELLIS: And the quarters, the bicentennial quarters. I remember those.

PIERRE: Oh, right, right, right. Exactly.

JOHN LEASE: I mean, it wasn't gaudy gold and flags in your face, but it was a much more optimistic kind of feeling.

I'm John Lease (ph), and I was born in Davenport, Iowa, but I live now in Centreville, Virginia. The buildup had been for a couple of years, you had your bicentennial minutes on TV all the time. When it actually came, they had the tall ships in the New York Harbor. They had a train from the Smithsonian that went all around the country that had different things. And we went to go see it in Pittsburgh, but the line was too long. My dad was not having it, so we just went home. I missed out of a chance to see Abe Lincoln's stovepipe hat.

I mean, you know, we'd been through a lot and seemed like this was really kind of turning the corner on everything 'cause I was in school when all this stuff with Nixon and Watergate was happening. So it was every day, every day on the news. And when he finally was out, it was such a relief in the whole country, really.

ANTHONY WILBON: My name is Anthony Wilbon (ph). I live in Bowie, Maryland. I grew up in Flint, Michigan. So in 1976, we had to do a huge event around remembering who the presidents were up to that point. The big thing was Coney dogs. All the Coney dogs had toppings that were red, white and blue, the onions and the ketchup and mustard and all that stuff and the (laughter)...

WILBON: I - that I can't recall. Maybe the ketchup (laughter).

'76 seemed to me to be a huge thing. Back then, we didn't have a lot of television channels. We didn't have iPhones, so everybody was focused on just the celebration of this country at the time. This seems to be - I see some activities around them - was America 250 and Freedom 250 and all these different things. But I just don't see the celebration or the excitement, as I did at the 200.

RASCOE: Granted, Washington is gearing up for July 4 right now. There are events here and in other communities all over the U.S. So the 250th isn't a bust, even if the excitement doesn't match what people remember from the bicentennial.

MARC STEIN: Parents had decided we were going to redecorate, and it was totally 1976. It was shag, navy blue carpets. It was colonial-era furniture, and on the wallpaper - red, white and blue stripes, stars and soldiers and drums.

RASCOE: That's historian Marc Stein, author of "Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History Of The 1970s." He says 1976 wasn't necessarily as rosy as people remember it.

STEIN: Planning for the bicentennial actually began in the late 1950s. So there was a really long lead-up in both Philadelphia, which is the core of my new book, and nationally. Then when Nixon was president, things really began developing in much more concrete plans. And, of course, that meant that by the time the bicentennial arrived, the United States was post Vietnam War, post Watergate and resignation of Nixon, post 1973 energy crisis. We were in the middle of economic hard times.

And so part of the political drama of the years leading up to the bicentennial was conflict between grandiose plans that Richard Nixon had and then the difficult budget situation and, of course, having a Democratic Congress. And so Congress essentially did not authorize the money that Nixon wanted and that Ford wanted, and so John Warner - who later married Elizabeth Taylor and became a U.S. senator, but at that time, he was the former Navy secretary - he took the lead of the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.

And he essentially moved the planning into a do-it-yourself affair with corporate support so the federal agency would share information, be a clearinghouse, but it would not pay the bills. And that created a lot of tension with especially Philadelphia because Philadelphia had been promised generous funds for being the centerpiece of the celebrations.

STEIN: Absolutely. And again, some of it was corporate sponsorship. So one of the big projects was called the American Freedom Train, that traveled...

STEIN: ...Across all 48 continental states and, you know, corporate sponsor. The bicentennial minutes that many people remember on CBS - those had corporate sponsors.

STEIN: Well, I think, in general, the 1876 centennial was seen as a great success. It was really a celebration of industrial achievement and American empire. The 1926 sesquicentennial was seen as a disaster, and Philadelphia attempted to put on a celebration, but it flopped.

RASCOE: We've been thinking about how divided the country is in 2026. And some of the people we spoke to - they mentioned the divisions, but they also mentioned that there were divisions in 1976, as well. Has the country ever not been divided?

STEIN: I think, basically, the answer to that is no. We've always been divided, and the protest movements took the opportunity of the bicentennial to launch conversations about different ways of thinking about American history. And so "Roots," for example, by Alex Haley - Alex Haley served on the National Bicentennial Commission's advisory board.

So he was very much thinking about the bicentennial, and then he comes up with a dramatically new way of thinking about American history that puts Black history at the center of the story. There were Black protest movements. There were Native Americans who launched what was called the trail of self-determination. LGBT Americans protested in a variety of ways. And then they all came together for big protest in Philadelphia, a big protest in Washington, D.C.

RASCOE: How does the 250th celebration compare to the bicentennial, in terms of scope and in terms of the country's mood?

STEIN: Well, I've been really struck by the eerie parallels between 1976 and 2026. We're, quote-unquote, "celebrating" in the aftermath of impeachment proceedings, in the aftermath of major Supreme Court decisions about executive authority and presidential leadership. Again, quote-unquote, "celebrating" in the midst of international conflict, energy and economic crises. But just as important, I would say, are the differences. 1976 was a presidential election year. And so there was a chance for the country to decide whether it wanted to keep our only nonelected president. That's obviously not the case in 2026.

Another really interesting difference is that in 1976, President Ford - and before him, President Nixon - had really wanted to use the commemoration to celebrate the notion of the United States as a nation of immigrants. Nixon even called for the celebration to include support for open borders, and there were mass naturalization ceremonies. And we're obviously at a very different moment in terms of national politics around immigration in 2026.

RASCOE: The spirit of '76, the revolutionary ideal that created the U.S. - do you see it alive in the U.S. today?

STEIN: Well, I see a lot of conversation about the gaps between the ideals proclaimed at the founding - equality, liberty, freedom, democracy, justice - and then the realities of people's experiences. And that, I have to say, as a historian, includes past experiences - say slavery, racial segregation - ongoing struggles - say Native American dispossession. And so I think that there's a real opportunity during these national birthdays to reflect on the gaps between the ideals proclaimed at the founding and then the realities of our history and the realities of our present.

RASCOE: That's Marc Stein, a history professor at San Francisco State University, and author of Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History Of The 1970s." Thank you so much for joining us.

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