2026 and Beyond at the JCB

When the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of its independence in 2026, the JCB will harness its strength as a repository and a research center for the history of the early Americas to elucidate the connections between the American Revolution and the breadth of democratic movements of the period. Traditional accounts link the American Revolution to European histories but the histories of communities within the region are equally important. Democratic revolutions in the Caribbean and South America point to the dynamics of national stability and instability and to the interconnectedness of the nations of the hemisphere that had been colonies. From its world-leading collections on the Haitian revolution to its exceptional material on Central and South America, the JCB will help illuminate patterns and interconnections across the Americas during this period.

The democratic nations that emerged in the Americas also shared important histories of colonization, independence, and Indigenous dispossession/survival as well as formerly enslaved peoples. An integral part of these histories is the ways in which many Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced and engaged with the ongoing work of nation-making in their midst. The JCB’s collections and convenings will explore this important dynamic.

How do we know what we know about the past? History rarely if ever reveals itself to us easily or transparently. Instead, it yields to the close study of a wide range of materials and a thorough understanding of existing relevant scholarship. The materials that make the era of revolutions legible are varied and frequently occluded by their patchwork survival, the narrow scope of authors and perspectives, by expectations about what counts as reliable sources of information, by the time necessary to reconstruct complex historical realities, and by their location across globally disparate collecting institutions. Perhaps most urgently, traditional, comfortable or expected historical narratives can be difficult to dislodge with fresh, evidence-based history.

The JCB will develop programming for 2026 and Beyond to encourage new approaches to exploring, teaching, and understanding how historical thinking develops from the primary source materials that have long shaped our histories. These efforts will shed light on how sources were produced, how they came to reside in libraries, and how they became available to scholars and community members.