Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

And welcome everyone to 2026.

Welcome to America's 250th birthday year.

And welcome to our year-long series, which we are calling

50 weeks that shaped America. Throughout 2026, as this country marks 250 years, we're going to be

doing 50 stories each week, a two-parter that lets us go deep, mostly new stories, but a few times

we'll be revisiting topics

that we've done in previous episodes, but want to explore more in depth. We will, as always on

this show, be all over the timeline jumping around through different eras of U.S. history,

250 years worth of stories, and we'll continue to try and generally tie them to the part of the

year in which we are telling them, like we've always done over the years. But this is also our chance to kind of take a step

back and try and figure out how we got to this moment, how 250 years of history shaped us

50 weeks, 50 stories that we think shaped America. And we start this week in 1976. The last time this country

got together and celebrated a huge birthday, it was the bicentennial, 200 years. And guess what? It was

very contentious time in the country. The planning was chaotic and divisive. The president was

very unpopular and maybe in a little bit over his head. So here to kick off our coverage of the semi-Quincennial with a look back at the bicentennial

are, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter-Jackson of Wesley.

Hello there.

Hello, Jody.

Hey there.

Welcome to 50 Weeks that shaped America.

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