The Pursuit of a National Identity: Employing Conjunctures to Commemorate the American Semiquincentennial

ABSTRACT

In 2026, we, the people of the United States, will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of the nation. To mark this milestone, four prominent institutions in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania—Lafayette College, the Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society (NCHGS), the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor (DLNHC), and the Historic Bethlehem Museums and Sites (HBMS)—have collaborated to present an extensive exhibition titled Resilience, Resolve, and Revolutionaries: Lehigh Valley Contributions to the New Nation . Structured into seven distinct parts across 3 years and multiple sites, the exhibition foregrounds the frequently marginalized narratives of women, enslaved individuals, Indigenous peoples, and religious minorities whose contributions shaped the new nation. Drawing on Lawrence Grossberg's conjunctural framework from Cultural Studies, this paper argues that conjunctural curating provides both the theoretical scaffolding and the practical methodology for contextualizing American identity within the present moment of political polarization. Each exhibition component is analyzed through three conjunctures—labor, space, and thought—demonstrating how a complex, multi‐site collaborative project can operate as a coherent intellectual‐political intervention. At the level of practice, conjunctural curating means presenting contradictory historical evidence, including pacifist Moravian gunsmiths, immigrant industrial pioneers, and an enslaved double agent, to generate a non‐linear, multi‐vocal interpretation of the American founding that resists the closure of any single national narrative.