Dole Institute announces free summer events for America's 250th birthday

The Dole Institute of Politics is using its west-campus stage at 2350 Petefish Drive to bring America’s 250th birthday into Lawrence, with a free public summer lineup anchored by a June 29 Dole Forum conversation between former U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage.

That program runs from 7 to 8:15 p.m. as a hybrid event, and the institute says limited copies of Gage’s new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History, will be available free. The book moves through 13 road trips tied to 13 important moments and places in American history, from Independence Hall and the Alamo to Los Alamos and Manhattan Project sites, with Disneyland folded into the Southern California chapter of the national story.

Gage’s book is built around a simple but potent idea: history is easier to understand when it is tied to the places where it happened. That makes the June 29 forum more than a standard author talk. It puts a national historian and a former top federal archivist in the same room to discuss how Americans remember the past, what gets celebrated, and what should be confronted alongside the pageantry of the semiquincentennial.

Shogan brings her own historical significance to the discussion. National Archives and Records Administration materials say she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 10, 2023, assumed office on May 17, 2023, and became the 11th Archivist of the United States and the first woman to hold the post permanently.

The June 29 event is part of a broader America at 250 effort the Dole Institute announced on May 20. Every event in the summer series is free and open to the public, a detail that matters in Lawrence, where the institute’s programming can draw families, students and visitors onto the University of Kansas west campus during a slower stretch of the summer calendar.

The institute is also extending the anniversary beyond one lecture. It is partnering with the Watkins Museum of History and the City of Lawrence Department of Parks, Recreation and Culture on a Douglas County public servants tribute project tied to America at 250. Taken together, the effort turns the semiquincentennial into something local and visible, not just a national milestone marked from a distance.