"This ambitious book is so needed--at a moment when the cultural and political divides Stein details offer both lessons from the past and key strategies for navigating our ever-changing national landscape as we approach the semiquincentennial. In Stein's eloquent hands, the 1970s become not a period of fragmentation and loss (though there is some), of siloing of activists, but rather a decade that bore witness to broad coalitions that included, for the first time, LGBTQ+ individuals/groups and their goals and the emergence of what today we would term 'intersectional' approaches. He has crafted here a history of city planning and urban development alongside a meticulously detailed and persuasive analysis of the ways in which local, state, and national politics and politicians framed the bicentennial. It is a richly layered, powerful book."--Leisa Meyer, American Studies Program, College of William and Mary, author of "Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps During World War II"

"The United States marks its semiquincentennial in 2026, and Stein looks back at the differences and similarities to the US Bicentennial in 1976. . . . Stein shows that, outside the official planning and programming, the values and rhetoric of the Revolutionary era sparked a spirit of '76 that pushed for LGBTQIA+ rights, women's equality, and justice reforms unimaginable two centuries earlier. It also exposed a grimmer history, as white supremacists and anti-immigration activists surfaced to claim the celebration. A comprehensive and critical look at the Spirit of 1976."

"As the nation prepares to mark the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its founding, it's easy to forget that the two hundredth wasn't exactly smooth sailing. . . . The simmering resentments of the Bicentennial reached their fullest expression, unsurprisingly, in Philadelphia, as the historian Stein recounts in Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s."