America, you’ve got the dates wrong.
Your intense debate over which year marks the real beginning of the United States—1619 (slavery’s arrival) or 1776 (Declaration of Independence)—has become predictably polarizing. You might even say that this argument over how to understand our history, repeated ad nauseam in school board meetings and on cable TV, has come to resemble what this nation was like before California entered the Union:
Boring as hell.
If we want to find a compelling origin story for the country in which we actually live, then it makes little sense to center the early human horrors of the tiny, pre-industrial 17th-century Virginia colony, or to elevate the propagandistic pretensions of 18th-century white men starting a country with a population as big as today’s Riverside County.
For all the differences between partisans of 1619 (progressives who see America as entirely founded on slavery) and 1776 (conservatives touting the whitewashed nonsense that America was founded on freedom), they share a common and still socially acceptable prejudice: East Coast bias.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project, touted as a more inclusive account of American history when first published in 2019, gives California just three cursory mentions. The Trump administration’s bonkers rejoinder to the 1619 Project, the 1776 report, supposedly devoted to American greatness, doesn’t mention America’s greatest state even once.
To close this culture war battle, the nation must look West toward reality. Much like a party that only truly starts when the coolest kid saunters in, today’s United States—antically ambitious, deliriously diverse, violently war-mongering, maniacally money-grubbing, and kaleidoscopically cruel—did not really get rolling until California arrived in 1848.
If we’re going to have a new historical curriculum built around just 365 (or 366) days, 1848, that year of revolutions around the world, is the obvious choice. Two 1848 events—California’s Gold Rush and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—together constituted an undeclared revolution, essentially re-founding the United States with different peoples, different borders, and far different aspirations.
James Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill brought people to California from every corner of the world, including a huge, unprecedented influx from Asia. The Gold Rush arrivals were not drab and pious Puritans, seeking religious freedom. They were a motley and largely unrefined lot, fleeing jailers and bad debts in search of fortunes, which they rarely found. What they would find were new debts, in a United States that their descendants would help turn into the world’s largest debtor nation.