Author Casey Chalk profileNext year marks the much anticipated semiquincentennial celebration of our nation’s founding, when 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, severing themselves from the British Crown to form a new body politic. Certainly the Fourth of July will, rightly, serve as the high watermark of our national festivities.

But in truth it was not simply the signing of that document that makes 250 years such a significant memorial, but everything that transpired in that fateful year: the British evacuation of Boston in March; the Americans’ disastrous defeat at the Battle of Long Island in August; the American counterattack in New Jersey in December. And as Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough’s best-selling book 1776 records, no figure looms larger in all of these events than George Washington. As much as 2026 is America’s year, we would do well to remember that it is so in large part because of that one remarkable hero. …

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