Meet a Reporter: Jennifer Schuessler

By David Gardner

Five years ago, Jennifer Schuessler typed the word semiquincentennial for the first time. For most people outside of the United States's Semiquincentennial Commission, the 250th still seemed like a project for the distant future. But for the past five years, Jennifer has been thinking, reporting and writing about what this anniversary means in the context of history, our present political climate and American culture. She spoke with us about that work - and about how, unfortunately, our spell-checking software still refuses to acknowledge semiquincentennial.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you want to be a journalist?

I didn't set out to be a journalist. I worked on my high school newspaper, but I didn't pursue that in college. Coming out of college, I had vague literary ambitions with no idea how to achieve them. I ultimately gravitated toward being a reporter because I love to read, listen, talk and ask a lot of questions. Also, it has turned out to be a great way to indulge my nerdy and sometimes eccentric interests.

How did you break into the profession, and how did you find your way to The Times?

After college, I moved to New York City. I got a boring job and worked it for a year before getting an internship with The New York Review of Books. It was a very old-school internship: a lot of getting coffee and answering phones and making photocopies. Then I started to write freelance book reviews and profiles of writers - and whatever else editors would let me do.

I left for The Boston Globe, where I helped start the Sunday ideas section. When I first joined The Times, I was an editor on the Book Review and then moved to the Culture desk a few years later. Broadly, I cover intellectual life and the world of ideas. It's an extension of all the work I've done to this point in my career - except for maybe the photocopying.

How do you approach digging into controversies, where a historical moment has been subjected to interpretation and reinterpretation sometimes for centuries?

I think often the reason I'm writing about something is because it's controversial. If there's a red-hot public controversy or an intellectual debate, that means that there is tension and there are stakes, and those make for good stories. In the past 10-15 years, history has become a matter of intense public conversation - and a flashpoint in our politics. Politicians from the president on down are constantly invoking history.

I also try to show that the way that we talk about history, and especially American history - that itself has a history. New evidence or findings come to light and consensuses change and questions change.

And as with all of our coverage, I try to talk to a range of people and for the story to be fair and complete. I want to cover the range of a debate but also give our readers a sense of what we truly know factually and empirically.

With such a broad beat, how do you find story ideas?

Sometimes I'm not even sure. I have a lot of sources that I've developed over the years. I'm always looking for new people to talk to - professors, writers, archivists, curators. I'm looking for new movies, books and exhibits that are coming out. I also find stories on social media or through questions from readers or random conversations I have with people, whether they're friends or strangers.

I try to follow my own curiosity. If I'm curious about something and it's sticking in my mind, there's a reason for that.

You first started writing about America's 250th anniversary five years ago. Why then?

I've been writing about the debate over narratives in American history for some time. In the past 10 years, there have been a lot of intense conversations about our history - from monuments to historical sites to the founding of the country. In 2020, President Trump held a White House history conference and created a 1776 commission to restore what he described as "patriotic" history. It was in part a reaction to The Times's 1619 Project.

I'm barely old enough to remember the bicentennial in 1976, and though I don't remember much about it, I do remember it being a moment. I started to think about this question of the 250th, and how it will go when we're in the midst of highly partisan wars about history.

Five years ago, I published my first story about it. I think it was the first time we used the word semiquincentennial in the paper in connection with the anniversary.

How many times have you written semiquincentennial in the past few years?

From that first story five years ago, I did an additional story around July 4 every year checking in on the progress. And then 250th anniversaries of specific milestones started to come up - of the Boston Tea Party, which happened in December 1773, and Lexington and Concord, which happened in April 1775. I would say that, outside of our reporting, there was not a lot of coverage of the broader semiquincentennial. Now that the date is almost here, many publications are catching up with their coverage.

Some people have called it the sestercentennial, and others are pushing quarter-mil, as in a quarter-millennium. This anniversary is saddled with some very strange language.

As part of the coverage of the 250th, you've also been writing about the 200th - the bicentennial. What have you learned about what that moment meant for Americans?

I think I've become a bicentennial nerd, which is a little like being a Disney adult. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and even though Illinois wasn't part of the original 13 colonies, the bicentennial was a big deal. There were parades and celebrations, and there was a ton of merch.

As I've gone back and researched and read about that time, you do see a lot of similarities with now. It was a fraught political moment for our country. The planning seemed disorganized. It became politicized - people on the left and the right accused each other of trying to hijack it. But at the same time, it was a generative moment. The African American Museum of Philadelphia, the first museum of its kind funded by a major municipality, began in the bicentennial year. There was a survey done in the late 1980s that showed that 40 percent of the historical groups in the country were founded that year.

Right now, we certainly see a constant, real, unfolding impulse of Americans to know their own history. Will this 250th moment have an impact, and what will it be? That's one thing you learn from history - you don't know till much later.

One of the most fascinating stories was about the Bicentennial Schlock collection at Yale. Did you have a personal favorite artifact that they showed you?

It was so much fun to do. I had known about this collection for a while, and I was curious to go see it. In some ways the schlock itself was a little anticlimactic. It was a red-white-and-blue paper straw sleeve from some diner or a syrup bottle with the Liberty Bell on it. Probably, many of us have similar looking items in our basements. What was cool was the origin story of the collection, which was gathered as a 1976 class project, and the fact that all this junk is now held at the Beinecke Library, which also has a Gutenberg Bible and hand-drawn maps by Lewis and Clark.

My personal favorite was a promotional tabletop card advertising a project called Chicken '76: the revolutionary chicken. Honestly, the chicken looked pretty unimpressive, but there was something I loved about the idea of rolling up to a diner and ordering patriotic chicken.

How do you balance your personal feelings about being an American and celebrating this day with journalistic responsibility of looking dispassionately about our history?

As with everything I write about, I try to be fair and thorough and represent a lot of points of view. But when you're talking about history and identity, we're enmeshed in that world and part of that. If you're an American journalist, as I am, our Constitutional right to a free press is sacred to me. I don't pretend to be neutral about it.

But I can still appreciate that patriotism, America, this anniversary - they mean different things to different people. I spend time talking to experts, historians, scholars and people in museums. But history belongs to all of us. The meaning of this anniversary won't be determined by politicians or historians, and it certainly won't be determined by me. All I can do is put solid historical knowledge and context and reporting and thoughtful questions in front of people and hope that they'll spend a few minutes reading the articles.

I know there's a lot of handwringing and even some ambivalence about this anniversary, but I'm personally excited to see what happens - the somber, the surprising, the zany, the tacky.

How will you celebrate the Fourth?

I dimly recall going to Boston with my grandmother in 1976 and seeing the tall ships from around the world. Those tall ships will be back for the 250th, and as in 1976, there are multiple stops along the East Coast, and I'll catch them during their big July 4 stop in New York City. I'd love to be on board one of them - listening to 18th-century sailor jokes and taking in the fireworks.