Abstract
After years of social unrest and political crises at home and of waning international power, many Americans welcomed the 1976 bicentennial anniversary of the United States as an occasion for rosy nostalgia. They staged readings of the Declaration of Independence and reen-acted Revolutionary War battles, cruised in vintage sailing ships, and boarded a “Freedom Train” that toured the country. Like the first Freedom Train in the late 1940s, the bicentennial version exalted a history of homegrown liberty and displayed such treasured Americana as George Washington’s copy of the Constitution. Although the rolling exhibit also carried a moon rock retrieved by Apollo astronauts, it dwelt largely on the past and ventured little into the troubling present or a futuristic space age. Patriotic nostalgia and cautious soothsaying were also evident that year at the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. President Gerald R. Ford dedicated the museum by invoking a national past in which “the frontier shaped and molded our society and our people,” but he avoided airy talk of new frontiers as he vaguely foretold a future in which Americans “are always at the edge of the unknown.”1 The president struck a similarly prosaic note in his bicentennial salutations to the US Science and Technology Exposition at NASA’s Cape Canaveral in Florida.
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Notes
Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), 16.
Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 225.
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Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Signet Classics, 1961),
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Spiller, J. (2015). Antarctica and the Greening of America. In: Frontiers for the American Century. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507877_4
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