I was just 9 years old when America celebrated its 200th birthday, but I remember the Bicentennial as a national wellspring of joy, gratitude and unity that’s almost unimaginable today.

I was in the third grade and carried my brand-new “Spirit of ’76” lunchbox to the fire hall down the block from my elementary school. We ate lunch there every day. None of us had even heard the word “cafeteria.”

My lunchbox was a humble source of respect and envy. All the boys at my assigned table were caught up in the national wave of patriotism and pride that seemed to lift everyone and everything around us. Our place in the world was small, but being Americans made us feel big.

My friends and I were enthralled by the story of Johnny Tremain, a 14-year-old silversmith apprentice in Boston in the years leading up to the Revolution. Johnny’s right hand was horribly burned in a workplace accident and his smithing days were over.

Personal injury lawyers and worker’s compensation didn’t exist in the British colonies, so Johnny was on his own in a brutal job market. Prospective employers took one look at his ruined right hand and sent him away. There were no antidiscrimination laws in a society that didn’t abolish slavery until almost a century later.

Johnny Tremain leveraged his meager connections and landed a job delivering a weekly newspaper on a cool horse named Goblin. The post led to his participation in the Boston Tea Party and hobnobbing with legendary patriots including Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere. At the end of the 1943 novel by Esther Forbes, a doctor offers to “fix” Johnny’s right hand so he can pick up a musket and cut down Redcoats.

The rest is history. Not.

My friends and I all wanted to be like Johnny Tremain. He was brave, resourceful and played a small but important role in the creation of the nation.

He was also entirely imaginary. The story was an early work of “historical fiction.” As third graders who believed pretty much everything we were told or read or saw on the three channels of TV network news, we had no concept of any such thing. When Walter Cronkite said, “That’s the way it was,” our parents nodded in agreement and we dutifully followed suit. After all, we were Americans, too.

A few grades later, my friends and I began learning that history as it actually happened didn’t always match the stories we were told, that for every fictional Johnny Tremain, there’s a Benedict Arnold. America was truly a “Shining City on a Hill,” but too often withheld “self-evident, inalienable rights” from the most vulnerable and exploited among us in the name of God, capitalism and “manifest destiny.”

I learned that the Constitution, Our Republic’s most sacred text, didn’t originally recognize non-whites as human beings, that women didn’t have the right to vote until 1920, that non-whites had no federally protected right to vote until 1965 and that for most of American history, the comforts of the wealthy were religiously served at the eternal expense of the poor and working classes.

I also learned that the American Revolution inspired many more around the world, that our Constitution served as a framework for many fledgling democracies, that immigrants built the nation from the ground up, that poor and working class Americans saved the world from fascism and that America, for all its faults and failures, was and is an indispensable, historic force for good, justice and freedom.

But our government and too many Americans aren’t living up to those ideals at the moment. Our Shining City on a Hill is being vandalized, looted and sold piecemeal to billionaires while the progress we’ve made in civil rights, global influence and upward social mobility is erased in favor of a return to Gilded Age “standards.”

Even our hard-won heritage is under attack by sinister revisionists determined to replace history as it actually happened with cynical fiction designed to ensure today’s third graders learn never to question the approved national narrative. Johnny Tremain was created to promote patriotism and pride among young Americans. The hobgoblins cobbling today’s fables conflate the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol with the Boston Tea Party.

I’m 58. America is 250. Most of the childhood friends who admired my “Spirit of ’76” lunchbox are distant memories to me now. A few didn’t live to see the “Semiquincentennial,” which doesn’t have quite the same ring as the milestone we shared in 1976 but is still cause for celebration.

The joy, gratitude and unity that was so common at the Bicentennial seems scarce as we mark America’s 250th birthday, but the “Spirit of ’76” is alive and rising among Americans who know tyranny when they see it and are willing to look past personal and political differences to band together and beat it back into history.

Pack a lunchbox. This may take a while.

Chris Kelly, the Times-Tribune columnist, wishes you and yours a happy, safe Fourth of July weekend. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.