The Second Continental Congress read the draft Declaration of Independence for the first time on Friday, June 28, 1776, in Philadelphia. The following day, a continent away, a small party of Spanish soldiers and missionaries celebrated mass on the San Francisco peninsula, establishing the mission that would grow into the city of San Francisco.^[1]

A week earlier, the Comanche had raided the Spanish settlement at La Ciénega, the latest in a decade of attacks that had established the Tribe as the region’s dominant power and pushed Spain’s colonial project in New Mexico to the edge of collapse.^[2] The attack delayed two priests, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, from their intended departure on July 4 on an expedition seeking a new route between Santa Fe and Monterrey. But it did not deter them. By August, as British troops launched a successful assault on New York City, they were exploring the ancient remains of an Ancestral Puebloan dwelling in what is today Southern Colorado and adding to Spanish knowledge about the Tribes who call the region home: the Ute, Paiute, Navajo, and others.^[3]

The summer of 1776 brimmed with consequential activities throughout North America. When we think of the events of that year within what Karin Wulf memorably described as “vast early America,” more comes to mind than the American Revolution.^[4] These interwoven narratives are why we are approaching the America 250 anniversary differently in the West. It means celebrating American ideals as they were articulated in the Declaration, without confining them to a tight focus on the Revolution. It also means reckoning with overlapping histories that can seem more tangibly present out West.

Visitors enter the Moments That Made US exhibition at the History Colorado Center in Denver in November 2025. (Credit: History Colorado)

At History Colorado, our most ambitious effort to examine the nation’s Semiquincentennial anniversary through a Western lens is the new exhibition Moments That Made US. It revolves around the insight that while the American experiment was begun on the East Coast and crystalized in the Declaration, it was often as the nation moved west that the ideals articulated in the Declaration acquired meaning through application. The exhibition is on view at the History Colorado Center in Denver and in unique adaptations at hundreds of local museums, libraries, and other host venues in communities throughout the nation.

Panels from the customizable version of Moments That Made US for community organizations on exhibit at the Animas Museum in Durango, Colorado, in May 2026. (Credit: Susan Jones)

The Moments That Made US exhibition at the History Colorado Center in Denver focuses on a series of turning points that had lasting significance in shaping the events we call U.S. history. Extraordinary artifacts open a window into each moment, from George Washington’s spurs and lead type cast in Cherokee to Chinese immigrants’ identity papers, a Colorado women’s suffrage ballot, Jackie Robinson’s bat, Richard Nixon’s tape recorder, and more. Our hope is that it is empowering and inspiring for visitors to encounter these turning points past as reminders that every generation faces consequential moments, and that we are likewise empowered to chart our own course through the one(s) we face today.

Patrons view Jackie Robinson’s bat in the Moments That Made US exhibition at the History Colorado Center in November 2025. (Credit: History Colorado)

Each of those moments is interpreted from three perspectives of people who experienced them differently at the time. An early Mexican printing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, for example, speaks to the experience of those Mexican families in lands ceded to the United States. They may have read it to understand how the border had shifted, leaving them in a new nation. It also represents the view of many Americans that the newly acquired territory stretching to the Pacific was the nation’s Manifest Destiny realized. And to Native people living in the ceded territory—who were by far the majority of the population—the treaty represented another empire’s paper claim to their homelands. What does, or should, “consent of the governed” mean for these people, who have such different relationships to the same single moment?

This approach asks visitors to hold competing experiences in tension, but exit surveys and critical reviews suggest that many appreciate encountering these well-known moments through new lenses, outside the simple linear narratives most are familiar with. We hope this kind of empathy-driven approach to our shared history can be an antidote to the poisonous polarization many of us are concerned about in the present.

A George Washington reenactor speaks at an event featuring the customizable version of Moments That Made US for community organizations at the Washington State Capitol in March 2026. (Credit: Washington State Archives and Washington State America’s 250th)

As visitors reach the end of the gallery, we conclude by inviting them to consider “Our Moment.” They encounter a case containing a Black Lives Matter protest sign, one of the first vials of Covid vaccine administered in Colorado, and a gas mask and pen belonging to Representative Jason Crow with which he prepared to fight his way out of the House chamber on January 6, 2021.^[5] We end here not to court controversy, but to ask visitors to reflect on the moments they’ve encountered throughout the exhibition in light of our present moment.

As we developed Moments That Made US, we realized it could also help smaller museums engage with the Semiquincentennial in ways that resonated locally. Working with partners across the west, we created a free, modular version centered on five themes from the Declaration, which institutions can customize with local stories and collections.

Arizona’s mobile museum featured Moments That Made US as it toured the state and welcomed thousands of visitors in the spring of 2026. (Credit: Antonia Muskat)

It’s a new model, and it requires a high degree of trust to encourage people to customize it as they think best for their communities. But like the signers of the Declaration, we feel mutually pledged to those who want to offer this sort of empathy-driven, empowering American history to their communities.  And early indications are that it is meeting a need: As we approach the summer, it is poised to be part of the commemorative programming at nearly six hundred locations as of this writing—including museums, libraries, other cultural institutions, government buildings, schools and universities, city walking trails, and even Arizona’s mobile museum—across thirty-four states and Washington, DC.^[6]

This widespread embrace of this exhibition, with its emphasis on an empowering and inclusive exploration of the moments that have shaped our shared national journey up to now, suggests that Moments That Made US may have begun as a western approach to America 250, but it is indeed a story of all of us that Americans everywhere are looking for.

Endnotes

^[1] Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed.,  Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, vol V (Washington, DC, 1906), 491; Francisco Palou, Life and apostolic labors of the Venerable Father Junípero Serra, founder of the Franciscan missions of California (Pasadena, CA, 1913), 203.

^[2] Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, The Missions of New Mexico, 1776 (Santa Fe, NM, 2012), 282; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT, 2008), 85–86.

^[3] Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, The Domínguez-Escalante Journal, ed. Ted J. Warner, trans. Fray Angelico Chavez,  (Salt Lake City, UT, 1995); Nick Saenz, “The Dominguez and Escalante Expedition in Ute Country,” The Colorado Magazine (Summer/Fall 2026), 25–34. The Domínguez-Escalante Expedition Education Project (DEEEP) has a map of the expedition’s route with the locations of specific journal entries marked (https://deeepcolorado.com/).

^[4] Karin Wulf, “Vast Early America,” Humanities 40, no. 1 (Winter 2019).

^[5] Andy Kroll, “‘I Called My Wife and Told Her I Loved Her’: One Congressman’s Story from Inside a Capitol Under Attack,” Rolling Stone, Jan 7, 2021.

^[6] The estimated number of host sites is based on the number of unique locations that have downloaded the file set. The final number is not yet known at press time.