The Horrifying Lessons of 250 Years of American History

A History of Violence

I’ve lived through the last 51 of America’s 250 years. For much of it, I’ve believed that the United States was sick beyond salvation. And yet, I never quite imagined the U.S. would be where it is today. That was a failure of vision because America at 250 is, in my estimation, exactly where it deserves to be. It’s a nation gone rancid, a country polluted by its past, and more so, by the abject failure to reckon with it.

Once, it seemed open to question. Would America be the land defined by Jim Crow? Or by the civil rights movement? The country that made war on innocent people half a world away? Or one that owned up to the criminality of that slaughter and turned swords into ploughshares? A nation that jailed women for sending information about birth control through the mail? Or a country that gave people autonomy over their bodies? The odds were always stacked against the U.S., poisoned at the root as it is by twin original sins: settler colonialism and chattel slavery. From these evils, so many other offenses to humanity have flowed. Maybe no country could overcome such a legacy.

Still, many Americans broke their bodies and laid down their lives trying to atone for the sins of the founders and those that followed them. Ordinary people pressed and struggled to gain some measure of the liberties, equality, and the chance at happiness promised, but not delivered, at America’s birth. In return, they faced terror, truncheons, and tear gas. Year after year, people denied supposedly inalienable rights faced down, for themselves and their neighbors, white-hooded nightriders and bayonet-bearing troops and robber barons and monied interests and hateful bigots and vicious police and craven politicians and foolish experts and infinite hordes of functionaries and good-German-type neighbors willing to do the bidding of oppressors or just look the other way. But because of all these shattered skulls and cracked ribs, endless abuse and arrests and incarcerations, there was a chance for redemption.

You could almost see it if you squinted hard enough. That fleeting moment when a panoply of rights movements appeared ascendant, and that long arc of the moral universe was straining hard toward justice, and the volunteers of America — an unarmed army of the better angels of our nature — were on the march. For an instant, it was there: a shining wave of promise about to swamp the forces of America’s decrepit order. Maybe you glimpsed it in the raucous joy of an occupied campus or park or city block, on a graffiti-scribbled wall, in the smoke of a burning tire, in the frenzied talk of a comrade, in the pages of a banned book, wherever; you sure knew it if you saw it.

But that shimmering wonder crested, collapsed, and consumed itself. Now you need to crane your neck and strain your eyes to see the bare trace of that high-water mark — the cruel evidence of the last, best hope for America’s redemption just before it was swept back into the depths. We’ve been drifting ever further from it since. 

If the question of which America would prevail hadn’t been settled earlier, the reelection of a megalomaniacal, racist, war-mongering, bigoted, vulgar, anti-democratic, authoritarian, inveterate liar, and would-be tyrant to preside over America’s semiquincentennial seemingly resolved it.

America is the “greatest, strongest, and most exceptional nation the world has ever known,” said President Donald Trump recently in celebrating the country’s 250th birthday with a rally on the National Mall. He added that it was “superior to any nation that’s ever been built no matter how many years it took.”

While Trump’s demented, deteriorating mind might not recall George Orwell’s warning in 1984 — “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — he or his minions certainly understand the concept on some level. Immediately upon taking office last year, Trump began efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history to match his boasts. An executive order issued last March took aim at a supposed “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” to “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” 

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It’s Trump, however, who has been rewriting history to comport with his claims. For months, to take one example, Trump has fought a pitched battle to censor the history of his presidential predecessor George Washington, whom he calls “our foremost American hero.” For his exploits at Trenton and Valley Forge, for his leadership in the turbulence of the Revolution’s wake, the capital bears Washington’s name and in it a giant obelisk stands in his honor. Most Americans have literally, if not figuratively, long embraced his visage since his face adorns the quarter and the dollar bill.

In January 2026, crowbar-wielding workmen descended on the President’s House site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, where Washington and his wife Martha lived in the 1790s — when the city was briefly the nation’s capital — with nine of their slaves. On orders from the Trump administration, the workers pried off panels discussing the ownership of people by our foremost American hero, details about the lives of those enslaved men and women, and information about the broader history of slavery. Recently, a federal appeals court discarded an injunction ordering the National Park Service to restore the site, allowing the Trump administration to replace the slavery exhibit. “It is an attempt to sanitize history and present a version of the past that is more comfortable, but far less truthful,” wrote the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which led the movement to craft the original display.

No country can be great, much less the “greatest,” if it’s afraid of its own people knowing the story of their nation. Trump looks at America and sees an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” according to that executive order. He claims that malevolent forces have “reconstructed” America’s past as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” fostering “a sense of national shame.” But no one need rewrite U.S. history to foster a sense of unrelenting disgrace. It’s everywhere, if we have the courage to call it out.

In 1779, for example, Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against native peoples, to bring about the “total ruin” of the so-called Six Nations across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements,” he told Maj. Gen. John Sullivan. When the operation was over, Sullivan’s army had destroyed more than 40 villages.

Such sins of America are legion. Given the time and space, one could name 250 or 250,000 or 2.5 million of them. On this Fourth of July, it’s worth recalling some of those inconvenient truths that Trump would rather you forget and future generations never know.

• Col. John Chivington, the head of the Colorado military district led more than 700 troops to attack Cheyenne and Arapaho groups at dawn on November 29, 1864. In what he called “an act of duty to ourselves and to civilization,” his men unleashed gunfire and artillery on a sleeping village at Sand Creek. For almost four hours, they slaughtered the camp’s inhabitants, two-thirds of them women and children. Many Native women were also raped, and Native American scalps, breasts, and genitalia were taken as souvenirs. In a letter to Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis, Chivington stated: “It may, perhaps, be unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners. Between five and six hundred Indians were left dead upon the field.”
• In 1914, striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security company opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car that the miners called “the Death Special.” Those miners fought the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered in federal troops. Almost 200 people were killed, according to some estimates.
• A two-day attack by white mobs on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921 began after Black Tulsans attempted to prevent a man’s lynching. Rioting white people, in response, killed hundreds, and more than 30 city blocks were destroyed, including a community known as Black Wall Street. Viola Ford Fletcher, a survivor, recalled piles of bodies in the streets and watched a white man execute a Black man and then shoot at her family.
• During the 20th century, coerced and forced sterilization became a method of controlling “undesirable” populations: disabled people, immigrants, people of color, the poor, unmarried mothers, those with mental illness, and others. This included federally funded sterilization programs in 32 states. Over 70 years in California, for example, approximately 20,000 men and women were sterilized in state institutions, often without their full consent.
• From 1932 to 1972, 399 black men, many of them sharecroppers and poor, in Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service as part of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Despite the availability of penicillin beginning in the 1940s and the fact that syphilis can damage the heart, brain, and other organs, government officials ensured the men received no medical care while telling them they were being treated for “bad blood.” 128 of the men are estimated to have died from syphilis and related complications.
• In a horrifying echo of the Tuskegee syphilis study, U.S. government and Guatemalan doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected more than 1,300 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, and sex workers with three sexually-transmitted infections — chancroid, gonorrhea, and syphilis — to study potential treatments. The researchers also paid sex workers to transmit the diseases. Left untreated, all three can be fatal.
• The U.S. government conducted thousands of radiation experiments on Americans, including children, from 1944 to 1974. They included the injection of plutonium into people’s bodies, marching troops into the wake of a nuclear explosion, and releasing radioactive substances into the air to track their movement or effects.
• U.S. troops from the “Greatest Generation” committed tens if not hundreds of thousands of rapes in Europe during and after World War II. Around 190,000 German women alone were raped between the U.S invasion of Nazi Germany and 1955, when West Germany regained its sovereignty, according to one estimate. In reports compiled by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945, the youngest victim mentioned was a 7-year-old child. The oldest was a woman in her 60s.
• On August 6, 1945, the U.S. launched the world’s first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Around 70,000 people, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.
• The FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program targeted the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among others in the 1960s and 1970s. According to a 1976 Senate report, it “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.
• On March 15, 1968 in South Vietnam, U.S. troops were briefed by their commanding officer, Capt. Ernest Medina. The Americans were told they would find enemy troops in the village of My Lai and, as one unit member recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” When the troops arrived, they encountered only civilians: women, children, and old men. Nonetheless, Medina’s order was carried out. More than 500 civilians were slaughtered over the course of four hours. The soldiers even took a break to eat lunch amid the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, and systematically burned homes.

There is no way not to view these “historical milestones in a negative light.” Nor the sins of the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the global war on terror and the countless crimes they spawned. In the five-plus years Trump has been in the White House, alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars. We’ve also watched as Black women and men were murdered in cavalier fashion and anti-ICE protesters were gunned down in the streets. We’ve seen immigrants deported to foreign prisons, war zones, and human rights-violating pariah states for spite, and rights disappeared as if they were panels detailing historical truths.

“There has never been anything like the United States of America,” Trump said recently. It’s lucky for the world. Because for every landing at Normandy, there is a massacre at Bear River or Sand Creek or Samar or No Gun Ri or My Lai or Le Bac 2 many times over. I’ve spoken with hundreds of survivors of these types of atrocities. I know the story of America’s impact abroad better than most.

Trump believes that he resuscitated the U.S. “A short time ago we were a dead country,” he said during semiquincentennial festivities. “We were dead.” Those comments about America’s death resonated with me — even if I don’t think they’re true — because the other side of that coin is rebirth. While I don’t believe this country can be redeemed, that doesn’t mean it can’t be reborn.

Washington isn’t the only predecessor Trump loves. He’s also besotted with, as he put it, “the late, great Thomas Jefferson, one of our most important Founding Fathers.” Although in Trump’s version of history, Jefferson was a “principal writer of the Constitution.” (He actually authored the Declaration of Independence — the anniversary Trump is celebrating these days.) Perhaps if Trump knew what Jefferson, another slaveholder, actually wrote, he would be less enamored. Whatever his grave faults, Jefferson offered a prescription for an ailing nation. What country “can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” he asked in a 1787 letter. Noting the necessity of “rebellion,” he continued, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Two hundred and fifty years in, during the presidency of a sick-minded, wanna-be despot, and despoiler of history, it’s worth considering the endless sins of America, its sheer brutality, its staunch resistance to reform, and how one of Trump’s favorite founders thought about sending a message to “rulers.” A country that won’t face its crimes and instead tries to disappear them can’t be saved. Even rebellion, at this late date, might be only a half-measure. But if there is any wisdom left in Jefferson’s words, it could be somewhere to start. 

The post The Horrifying Lessons of 250 Years of American History appeared first on The Intercept.