Tiahna Pantovich joins Veterans for Political Innovation to discuss how her desire to serve took her through the Army, to become a therapist, and to become an advocate for election innovation, how she has felt disenfranchised by the partisan primary system, and the challenge of not sitting entirely in one identity, but identifying as a unique individual with multiple identities.
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According to the Library of Congress, immigration has played a central role in shaping communities across the United States. (Adobe Stock)
(Adobe Stock)
Michigan exhibit explores immigration and American identity
Jul 03, 2026
As the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, the Holland Museum and Zeeland Historical Society are partnering on an exhibit exploring the people and cultures who helped shape their West Michigan communities.
The “We the People” exhibit features artifacts, personal stories and interactive displays highlighting Indigenous communities, Dutch settlers and more recent immigrant groups.
Michelle Stempien, executive director of the Holland Museum, said the oral history component is highlighted at both museums.
“We are capturing people’s voices today in this moment of the 250th anniversary about what it means to them to be an American, making sure to include people that have different heritages and different backgrounds,” Stempien explained.
The exhibit runs through Jan. 11, 2027, at both the Holland Museum and the Zeeland Historical Society. Museum leaders are encouraging visitors to experience both locations to gain a fuller understanding of the region’s diverse cultural history.
Through artifacts and personal stories, the exhibit also explores how the meaning of “We the People” has evolved over time. Stempien pointed out the exhibit asks visitors to reflect on their own identities.
“Within that historic storytelling, we’re asking the question, what does it mean to you to be an American?” she added.
Audrey Rojo, curator and interim director of the Zeeland Historical Society, said some visitors have connected their own immigration stories to those of Dutch settlers featured in the exhibit, finding similarities in experiences that span generations and cultures.
“That to me is just something important, that human connection, finding that human connection and realizing that maybe we’re not all so different,” Rojo observed.
Michigan exhibit explores immigration and American identity was first published on Public News Service and was republished with permission.
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As America approaches its 250th birthday, a reflection on patriotism, political division, resilience, and why the nation is greater than any party.
Kathy Dorsey / Getty Images
A Nation Larger Than Its Politics
Jul 02, 2026
As America approaches its 250th birthday, I find myself wondering whether we have lost sight of something that earlier generations understood instinctively.
Americans have never agreed on politics.
We have argued over wars, taxes, immigration, religion, civil rights, economic policy, and the proper role of government. We have elected leaders who inspired confidence and leaders who inspired outrage. Political conflict is not a recent development. It is woven into the fabric of American history.
What concerns me today is not that we disagree.
It is that we increasingly seem to confuse the nation with the people temporarily entrusted to govern it.
When our preferred party wins, America appears to be moving in the right direction. When it loses, the country itself can seem broken. Political victories are treated as proof of national virtue. Political defeats are treated as evidence of national decline.
But a nation is larger than its politics.
Throughout our history, Americans have often been deeply critical of their government while remaining deeply committed to their country.
The abolitionists criticized laws that protected slavery. Suffragists challenged a political system that denied women the vote. Civil rights leaders confronted institutions that failed to live up to the nation's ideals. Conservatives and progressives alike have spent generations arguing that government was overreaching, underperforming, corrupt, or misguided.
Yet most of those movements shared an underlying conviction: America was worth improving.
Their criticism grew from a belief in the country's promise, not a rejection of it.
That distinction matters because confidence is not the same as complacency. A confident nation can confront its failures because it believes improvement is possible. A nation that loses confidence begins to view every disagreement as an existential threat and every election as a final battle. The result is not greater civic engagement but growing civic despair.
I graduated from high school during America's Bicentennial. The country was still grappling with the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War. Trust in government had been badly shaken. Americans had plenty to criticize.
Yet what I remember most was not cynicism. It was confidence.
Few people I knew believed the country was perfect. Many believed the government had failed. But there was a widespread sense that America itself was resilient—that the nation was bigger than any administration, scandal, or political moment.
Looking back, that confidence may have been one of the greatest strengths of the American experiment.
The United States has endured a revolution, a civil war, economic depression, world wars, political upheaval, social unrest, and countless mistakes made by imperfect leaders. The story of America is not the story of avoiding failure.
It is the story of recovering from it.
Not perfect, but resilient.
Not free from conflict, but resilient.
Not always faithful to its ideals, but resilient.
The strength of a republic is not measured by the absence of disagreement. It is measured by the ability of citizens to disagree while maintaining a shared commitment to the nation itself. When that commitment weakens, politics ceases to be a debate about the future and becomes a struggle over whether a common future is even possible.
Today, that confidence sometimes feels harder to find.
We increasingly sort ourselves into political tribes. We consume different news, trust different institutions, and often view our fellow citizens through the lens of partisan identity. The temptation is to believe that if the other side prevails, the country itself is lost.
History suggests otherwise.
No political party is America. No president is America. No Congress, court, movement, or ideology is America.
America is the continuing project of a free people attempting, often imperfectly, to govern themselves.
That project has always been larger than any political moment.
As we celebrate the nation's 250th birthday, perhaps the question is not whether America has always lived up to its ideals. No honest observer could argue that it has.
The better question is whether we still believe those ideals are worth pursuing together.
Every generation inherits the republic from those who came before. For a brief period, we become its stewards. Then we pass it on.
During the Bicentennial, I thought mostly about the inheritance.
Fifty years later, I think more about the stewardship.
The measure of our patriotism is not whether we believe our country is flawless. It is whether we care enough about it to leave it stronger than we found it.
That responsibility belongs to all of us, regardless of party.
Because the nation we celebrate is, and always has been, larger than its politics.
Joe Palaggi is a writer and historian whose work sits at the crossroads of theology, politics, and American civic culture. He writes about the moral and historical forces that shape our national identity and the challenges of a polarized age.
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Ring–Fitzgerald Homestead, Will County (1987). A house still true to its original form, carrying forward the Rings’ steadiness, aspiration, and good citizenship across five generations.
Photo courtesy by Patrick Fitzgerald.
The Reward — Angela and James: An American Dynasty
Jul 02, 2026
They got an early start; the morning light came on fast. The Ring siblings were headed to the Joliet depot with young Angela in tow — the same depot where Lincoln’s funeral train had passed in silence thirty years earlier. Now they were bound for the White City, forty miles northeast. The Columbian Exposition was a turning point for both Angela and America. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, pitched just outside the fairgrounds, rivaled the Exhibition itself.
One photograph captured it all. Taken in a fairground photo booth, the Ring siblings stood in their summer clothes, huddled around eleven-year-old Angela. Their faces were bright and open — a single moment preserved in time. Determined to outshine the 1889 Paris Exhibition and its Eiffel Tower, Chicago answered with George Ferris’s great wheel. At night, the city glowed, outlined in electric white light.
Angela felt the moment more deeply than she expected. She loved being with her aunt and uncles, but something larger stirred in her. The White City and the Wild West Show made the world feel bigger, possible, open. They were no longer simply Irish immigrants. Angela felt her American roots for the first time — a sense of belonging to a country that was rising. From that day forward, nothing felt the same.
Her life changed abruptly when her mother, Julia, died at forty-one. Angela had already lost her father, Peter, at the moment of her birth. Now, she lost her mother too. She wasn’t technically an orphan — she was surrounded by a loving aunt and uncles — but she felt like one. She missed her mother quietly, deeply. She was the only next-generation Ring living on the land, raised by her bachelor uncles and her aunt Belle, who kept the household steady. Together, they formed the quiet, sturdy world that shaped her.
James “Jim” Fitzgerald and Angela likely met in the early years of the new century, when Angela was in her late teens, and Jim was a rising young farmer in the Fitzgerald clan. Their families overlapped in parish life, farm labor, and social gatherings. In a township where everyone knew everyone, their meeting was less an event than an inevitability.
Manhattan was shaped by three Irish clans: two Delaney lines and the Fitzgeralds. Jim’s sister, Susanne “Susie” Fitzgerald, began seeing William Delaney — a union that joined two of the largest families in the township. When my own parents, Red and Eleanor, married, they united all three. The Fitzgeralds, Delaneys, and Rings became the central force in Manhattan’s civic and social life.
My father was born in the Ring homestead, the old house that had carried the family from the immigrant era into the new century. But shortly after his birth, Angela and Jim moved to a new farm less than a mile east. The land was almost certainly financed by the Rings, as was the new house that followed. It wasn’t a break from the old homestead — it was an elevation.
As Angela left the Ring homestead with Jim and three children in April of that year, she left behind the pewter coffee pot with her initial carved into the metal. No one knows exactly where it ended up. It may have been set on a shelf or tucked into a corner as cousins rented the old place, but it endured — a quiet emblem of faith in family, the Union, and the promise of America. Years later, my mother, Eleanor, found it and restored it, placing it on her dining room bookshelves. After more than a century, it was back in a place of honor in the Rings’ ancestral home.
Jim and Angela went on to have seven sons and one daughter; their first child died in infancy. With two farms to run, Jim needed help. Having sons was a boon. He bought each boy a new car on his sixteenth birthday — not as an indulgence, but as recognition for the hard work he demanded of them. It was their reward. The boys now had wheels.
At the same time, Susie Fitzgerald and William Delaney were raising their own family — three boys and one girl. Through Jim and Susie, the Fitzgerald siblings came to lead two of the three dominant Irish clans in Manhattan Township — the Fitzgerald–Mackin line and the Fitzgerald–Delaney line.
And here, in the tight quarter mile between the two households, something remarkable happened. Between them there were nine boys, and when the hard work hit, they closed ranks and did it together. But they didn’t do it alone. Belle kept the Ring homestead steady, Susie anchored the Delaney side, and Mary and Loretta fueled the boys with the kind of muscle it takes to keep an army moving. Angela wasn’t a bystander — she was in the middle of it, helping set the pace, carrying her share, and absorbing the purpose of two households that operated as one. The boys brought the force; the women kept the force moving. Together, they turned that quarter mile into a launchpad.
The third great development of that era was the Rings’ construction of their Manhattan home. Not just any home — the grandest in town, built of coal-glazed brick, set on a rise, and surrounded by newly purchased land on the east side of town. They knew those lots would be subdivided someday, and securing that ground early was a savvy move — classic Rings. It was a time of expansion and confidence, when the United States itself was feeling its strength. The Rings did too.
America’s promise was being realized. The children of immigrants were free to think big, find common ground, and build something larger than themselves. Their parents had endured hardship and broken promises, but they never lost faith in the Union. Now, their children were reaping the benefits of that faith.
A moment captured the Rings’ highest aspirations: their gift of a stained-glass window to the parish church. America was realizing its promise, and the Rings, Fitzgeralds, and Delaneys were realizing theirs — just like Chicago, a city known throughout the world.
But proximity to such a dynamic city came with a price. Chicago’s glamour and danger reached into Manhattan, and not all of it passed harmlessly. Prohibition — and the wild years that followed its repeal — touched the next generation in ways no one foresaw. Some of the children were harmed by it. But even in that, the family’s principles held. Angela and Jim steadied themselves with the values they were raised on. They endured the era’s excesses without letting it define them.
For all the upheaval of modern times, they stayed steady. When the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began, they held their ground. They even expanded — buying a third farm as the nation slid into darkness. That was their instinct: when America faltered, they built. When times fractured, they looked for common ground. When the country struggled to keep its promise, they kept theirs.
By the time the Depression lifted, the Rings, Fitzgeralds, and Delaneys had become more than families — they had become a lineage with weight, memory, and purpose. What began with immigrants holding fast to the Union had grown into a dynasty that shaped the life of a small town and carried its values forward through every upheaval. They built when times were good, and they built when times were dark. They steadied themselves when the world around them swayed. Their story — Angela and Jim’s story — is the American story at its best: a belief that the future is worth building, that common ground can be found, and that a family’s principles can outlast the storms of any age.
Patrick Fitzgerald is a Buffalo-based writer whose work explores civic responsibility, community life, and the quiet virtues that hold people together. Raised in the Midwest and shaped by the steadiness of farm communities, he writes about proportion, neighborliness, and the shared duties that form the backbone of American civic life. His essays draw on lived experience, family lineage, and a deep sense of place to offer readers a grounded, reflective perspective on how we can rebuild trust in one another.
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us a flag on pole under cloudy sky
Photo by iStrfry , Marcus on Unsplash
A Letter to America on Your 250th Birthday
Jul 02, 2026
Dear America,
On July 4, 2026, you will turn 250 years old.
A semi-quincentennial is a milestone that very few republics in human history have ever reached. Two and a half centuries ago, a group of flawed but visionary individuals signed a document that flipped the script on human civilization, wagering that ordinary people could govern themselves without a king.
Today, you are a nation of 340 million people, spanning a continent and holding the title of the world’s largest economy. By any historical metric, the American experiment has been a staggering success.
Yet, as the fireworks prepare to launch, the mood across your towns and cities feels less like a celebration and more like an intervention. You are deeply anxious. But if you’re being honest with yourselves, you are anxious about the wrong things.
For years, you have been told by voices on your screens that the greatest danger facing your nation is the other political party. Some of you are told to fear billionaires; others, to fear bureaucrats. Some are told to fear immigrants; others are told to fear corporations. You have built a multi-billion-dollar industry around pointing fingers.
But as you reach this historic milestone, the greatest danger facing you is something else entirely: The growing belief that your problems are somebody else's responsibility.
No republic can survive when its citizens lose faith in their own ability to govern themselves and instead view citizenship as merely consuming services provided by someone else.
Look at the ledger you are handing to the next generation as a birthday present. Your federal debt has climbed to roughly $39 trillion. Debt held by the public has surpassed 100 percent of GDP for the first time since World War II. This year alone, your government is projected to spend about $7.4 trillion while collecting only $5.6 trillion in revenue.
This does not mean you are collapsing, America. It just means that arithmetic still exists. Every dollar you borrow today is an active claim on tomorrow’s workers, businesses, and taxpayers. And while you distract yourselves with endless, superficial culture wars online, the interest on that debt is quietly becoming one of the largest expenses in your federal budget.
Meanwhile, your population is aging. Nearly 18 percent of Americans are now over 65. Social Security and Medicare face severe, long-term financing challenges that will trigger major trust-fund shortfalls within the next decade.
These are not Republican facts. They are not Democratic facts. They are American facts.
Yet your modern politics rewards denial instead of solutions. One side promises that the government can solve every problem. The other promise is that the government is the problem. Neither statement is entirely true. The government built your highways, funded scientific breakthroughs, and put men on the moon. Private enterprise built your industries, created your jobs, and delivered innovations that transformed human life. You succeed when both are accountable to the people — not when either becomes an untouchable power.
This same paralysis is seen in your demographic reality. Your population growth now increasingly depends on immigration as birth rates fall. This fact should not frighten you, nor should it prevent you from asking reasonable questions about border security, assimilation, and national cohesion. A mature nation can believe two things at once: that immigration has historically strengthened its fabric, and that immigration laws must be enforced. The challenge before you is not choosing between compassion and order; it is finding the civic maturity to preserve both.
Beyond the budgets and the borders lies the deepest question of your 250th year: Do you still possess the restraint required to be a free people?
The greatest threat to a free people is not debt, inflation, immigration, or artificial intelligence. It is the loss of trust that allows free citizens to live together. When neighbors become enemies, democracy becomes impossible. When every election is treated as a national emergency, every defeat feels illegitimate. When every institution is assumed to be corrupt, eventually, none can function.
The Founders did not create a system that depended on total agreement. They created one that depended on restraint.
Your future will not be determined by Washington alone. It will be determined by whether you, the people, are still willing to sacrifice, participate, build, innovate, raise families, serve your communities, and tell the truth even when it is inconvenient.
The choice before you on this historic birthday is not Left or Right. It is whether you choose to remain a self-governing people. It is whether you can still solve problems without surrendering your freedom, and whether you can still disagree without destroying one another.
Resolve then, at 250 years old, to leave your children a nation stronger than the one you inherited. That is your modern rendezvous with destiny.
Happy Birthday, America.
Richard Hinds, retired small business owner.
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