July 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the declaration of the founding of the United States. Commemoration plans are scheduled across the country, with organizations such as America 250 leading the way. Of course, memorialization of the American Revolution is nothing new.  As Alfred Young has argued, since the 1760s the public memory of the Revolution has been a contested process of “willful forgetting and a purposeful remembering.” In our current era of active historical erasure, we especially should be attuned to public efforts to shape the memory of 1776, whether it be through “willful forgetting” or “purposeful remembering.” Our two-day symposium therefore seeks critical engagement with 1776 and its legacies.