Make History 250
American Stories of Land and Place
A Semiquincentennial Celebration
Places hold a multitude of stories – of people, places, and events. One version of our collective national story is a story of land - a story that includes loss but also resilience. Land has fueled the formation of communities, and sometimes their dissolution. Land is an idea that animates the mythologies we tell about who we are.
Thus we have created Make History 250.
Places shape us just as we shape places.
Make History 250 brings individuals, families, schools and neighborhoods together to create a collectively-written history of America captured in everyday stories of place. We invite people and communities across the United States to uncover the layers of history that define the spaces where they live, work and play.
The Occassion - America’s 250th
July 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Many people will mark this occasion by celebrating the nation’s founding. Make History 250 will celebrate the anniversary in another way - by providing an opportunity for people from all backgrounds to share their personal histories in order and create a people’s story of America told locally, place by place.
The Concept - Land Matters
We begin with land and place because American history has been made and written with land at its center. Ideas of property, belonging, industry, food production, and a national mythology which links freedom to expansive territory, all depend on land and place. Understanding American history requires understanding who lives where, how they got there, and why they stayed or left.
Make History 250 aims to raise public awareness about the history of places in order to encourage reflection and to collectively consider how ecology, history, and cultural identity connect to each other. Here is an opportunity to link one place’s past to multiple groups and histories.
We will offer tools, guides, training and collaborative partnerships for families, schools and neighborhood groups to build a national archive of places and to co-create multimedia pieces for the general public.
Finally, in July 2026 we will gather all participants together for a week of celebrations, sharing, and public dialogue.
How it Works
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Are you signing up for yourself, for your family, for an indigenous nation, for a school or college, or for a community organization? Then visit the Get Started section below to, well, get started!
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Individuals, organizations and cultural groups will choose specific, mappable locations which are meaningful to them. This can be a house, plot of land, farm, city block, college campus, sovereign territory, etc..
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Participants will receive guides, research tools, and trainings to support their research, story collection, and creative project from Whose Land?.
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Use the tools you now have to collect stories! You can interview your friends and neighbors; you can consult your local museum or archive; you can look through some old scrapbooks—the stories are out there, now you just have to find them!
Collections and research will be preserved and protected on Whose Land?’s customizable digital mapping and community archiving platform. The platform allows participants to assign privately-protected or publicly-viewable identifiers to their materials and media – whether historic photos, digitized artifacts, recorded oral histories, mini-documentary films or text-based narratives.
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Finally, we bring participants together in July 2026 for a Projecting 250 week where we ask participants to project in two ways—first we will project our histories into a vision of the future and second we will literally project those visions! It will be a nationwide showcase of projects and collected stories, projected onto buildings, parking lot walls, outdoor movie screens, and backyard garages.
Collecting Beyond 2026
The project’s central online repository and digital mapping platform - Map250- will serve both as a national archive of stories and as an infrastructural base for networking among participants across a wide spectrum of geography, culture, and backgrounds. Using such tools, participants can continue to share ideas and collaborations long past July 2026.
Questions You May Have
Can anyone participate? Any individual, family, organization or cultural group is welcome to participate!
How do I sign up? This site will continually be updated over the next eighteen months. If you have ideas to share or want to inquire about how to apply to become a participant and receive sponsorship, contact us.
Can you share some example projects? Of course! Here are some examples:
A digital photo album of a house that incorporates images from four families who lived in the house successively over the course of a century.
A high school’s archive of artifacts and student-led oral histories about the land that the school sits on including ecological, Indigenous and institutional history layers.
A neighborhood-based oral history and community-archiving project that documents the “genealogy” of a block – from Indigenous territory to farm track to planned urban grid to residential home and rental property.
A college filmmaking class’s documentary based on oral histories of the neighborhood surrounding their campus.
And so much more! Not sure if the project you have in mind will work? Reach out! We would love to talk with you about it!
Get Started
If you’re interested in becoming a participant or learning more, send us an inquiry here.
It takes resources from us to support each participant, but we understand that there is a range of resources each participant might have access to, and that is why we offer pricing on a sliding scale. More information will be made available soon. Be sure to periodically check this page for updates, and follow us on social media and sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a thing!
The Make History 250 Small Partners Initiative
Please consider supporting our 250th project for our under-funded partners. The Make History 250 small partners initiative will provide funds for students at K-12 schools, Tribal Nations, and local neighborhood groups to integrate their histories into a national collection that tells a ground-up version of our national story. The success of this project will not only bring stories to the fore that are often left out of mainstream narratives, but will allow groups, large and small, to connect with each other, engage in dialogue, and share resources to support their respective missions.
The 250th project will be a launching pad for our work for years into the future. Your support now will help us build a sustainable foundation for the long term.