Before he was sworn in as president of the United States on April 30, 1789, George Washington sat waiting in a plain mahogany chair.

It looks like any old thing you might scrounge up at an antiques sale or flea market. That, of course, is part of its beauty and brilliance—something that hit home when I saw this chair in person at the New York Historical, a museum in New York City, where I live.

I’m Liz Cantrell, deputy editor at Travel + Leisure. I’ve been thinking and writing about America for a long time. In my senior year of high school, I took part in a civics program called “We the People,” in which we learned about constitutional theory, our founding documents, and the branches of government. We also competed in mock congressional hearings on the state and national level, “testifying” before groups of judges. (Yes, it was exactly as nerdy as it sounds. I loved every minute.)

The New York Historical just opened its new Tang Wing for American Democracy, and the inaugural exhibit is truly remarkable. There are objects old (an original printing of the Declaration of Independence; a 34-star Union flag from the Civil War) and new (a gown stitched with the words “Equal Rights for Women,” worn by then-representative Carolyn B. Maloney to the Met Gala in 2021). It’s the perfect place to think about what it means to be an American—especially in 2026, the year of our country’s semiquincentennial, or, to use the term that’s much easier to pronounce, America 250.

As a travel editor, I cover not only the U.S. but the world. I’ve trekked to a lodge in the Indian Himalayas, been on safari in Tanzania’s Serengeti, and visited the archaeological wonders of Turkey. Still, some of my favorite reporting trips have been right here at home: white-water rafting in West Virginia’s New River Gorge National Park; hiking hut-to-hut in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains; staying at fabulous, iconic hotels like the Omni Homestead Resort, in Hot Springs, Virginia, with its natural thermal pools and acres of gorgeous Allegheny Mountain scenery.

When I think about America in its 250th year, I think about those wild spaces that I love so dearly, and the philosophies I studied in school, ones that expanded my thinking. It can be hard to square my love of my country with the practical reality of America in 2026.

This anniversary has stirred up intense feelings on all sides of the political spectrum; the very concept of patriotism is up for debate. Still, I, like many others, want to acknowledge the moment.

So the Question Is: Does America 250 Matter?

I say yes. It matters because of the people and places that are defining, reshaping, and writing a new American story.

It matters in places like Lawrence, Kansas, where residents enthusiastically embraced the Algerian national team, who were based there for training ahead of the World Cup. The University of Kansas band learned the Algerian national anthem and performed it for the players, and a local artist landscaped the Algerian flag into the campus grounds. For a match between Algeria and Jordan, a beloved town pub, Red Lyon Tavern, designated part of the restaurant as alcohol-free, brought in Algerian sodas and snacks, and arranged for two prayers, so that Muslim visitors would feel more at home. Another bar, Johnny’s Tavern, filmed a video of its staff welcoming the team in Arabic, English, and French. It now has over a million views on X.

America 250 matters because the American story is big and complicated, ever-changing, and never complete. To talk about America—which we should, because this country requires engaged, skeptical, demanding citizens—you have to see America.

So I think you should get out there, and meet people, and see things that make you stop and stand still. You should watch the full moon set as the sun rises over a dune in Death Valley National Park, in California. You should hear a loon call reverberating across Hozomeen Lake in the North Cascades of Washington.

You should eat fried cheese curds at the Minnesota State Fair, and have the best damn ice cream of your life in the dairy barn. You should visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and pause at the room of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, and think about how, as he lay dying, he crushed the lit cigarette he’d been holding into his palm, so that his children wouldn’t see he’d been smoking. These are just a few moments from some of my most memorable American trips, ones that stay with me always.

This year especially, there is so much to discover about the American experience. If you’re looking for places to begin your own travels, here are three museum experiences on my list.

• In Bentonville, Arkansas, there’s the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which sprawls across 134 acres in the Ozarks. It was created back in 2011 by Alice Walton (yes, of the billionaire Walton family that founded Walmart). Its new “Common Threads” exhibit is on view until July 27, so don’t miss the chance to see an American flag carried by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 moon mission, or a copy of The Federalist Papers from 1788. There are also pieces that will challenge you, like a self-portrait by Mexican-American photographer Mari Hernandez for which she styled herself to look like a male military figure, a colonizer.

• In Medora, North Dakota, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened on July 4, next to the national park that also bears his name. Roosevelt’s concept of citizenship feels more resonant and urgent than ever: he believed that it is active, a constant practice and dialogue. He believed in public lands, and in preserving wild spaces. He believed in being a good neighbor.

• The Obama Presidential Center, in Chicago, which opened June 19, is another jewel waiting to be explored—and not just for the impressive art collection, with works by Maya Lin, Nick Cave, and hometown artist Theaster Gates. There’s a basketball court, a fruit-and-vegetable garden, a library, a museum, and a giant picnic lawn.

These are just some of the places I’m looking forward to visiting. I hope that you go on your own journey of exploring and understanding America, and that it—much like the democracy we founded 250 years ago—is one of constant renewal.

I’m writing this book—and have been for half my life, appallingly—about a utopian radical who came from Germany to the Carolinas in the 1730s.

And given how long the project has consumed me, I’ve often wondered how that interest got triggered.

John Jeremiah Sullivan and I are talking over Zoom, and before long we’re going deep into the idea of utopia, the new wave of interest in the Shakers—and how it all connects to our current emotional state in America.

Hi, I’m Peter Terzian, features editor for Travel + Leisure. A big part of my job is getting to work with some of my all-time favorite writers, and sending them around the world to report on destinations from Italy to Maui to Antarctica.

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John Jeremiah Sullivan is one of those people. I first met John in 2004, when I interviewed him on the publication of his first book, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son, which interwove memories of his father with a kaleidoscopic history of the horse. Many of John’s early reported pieces and essays—on Axl Rose, cave art, and a Christian rock festival, among other subjects—were revised and collected in 2011 in Pulphead, a book that continues to inspire young writers. Over the past decade he’s moved from journalism toward history, fiction, criticism, poetry, and translation.

As our editorial team began working on our July issue—a tribute to America’s 250th—John was the first person I thought of. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he contributed a meditation on a place he knew from childhood: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, a restored community outside Lexington that was built in the early 19th century by the Shakers, a Christian sect that practiced a simple, celibate, egalitarian lifestyle and worshipped ecstatically.

In our subsequent text chats, John and I noticed that the Shakers were suddenly everywhere—I sent him photos of the digital poster for The Testament of Ann Lee, a recent biopic about their founder starring Amanda Seyfried, when I saw it outside a theater.
(“What is going on with the cosmic Shakers confluence???” he texted back.) But his essay also felt timely for another reason. John is currently finishing his third book, The Prime Minister of Paradise, about Christian Gottlieb Priber, who emigrated from Germany to America and attempted to establish a utopian community in the 1730s. And as I discovered during our conversation, a renewed fascination with figures like Priber—and communities like the Shakers—may say something larger about America right now.

When I asked you to write about an American place that held great personal significance for you, it took you about two seconds to suggest Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill. Why did it come to you so quickly?

It was my introduction to utopia. The place was just a short car ride outside of Lexington, but there was a time-warp quality to it that was fascinating for a kid. When you got there you were in a different world in a very real sense. You were in a place where people had chosen to live their lives in a fundamentally different way.

It was like an alternate history—that’s part of the appeal of utopian stories. What if it had worked? What if they had succeeded and grown, instead of mostly passing from the face of the earth? What would the country look like? You were in a place outside of capitalism, where people had chosen to live communally, and where sharing and cooperating were the main values.

So it was powerful to be exposed to that as a young person, and on a regular basis, because we would go there every year. I was already so sensitive to that central Kentucky landscape, which has such a mystery to it. And the idea that there was a lost utopian history had a lot of romance for me.

What draws you to the idea of utopias?

The less admirable side of the coin is probably sheer escapism. Utopian stories are inherently fantasy stories. They’re a way of hiding from the reality of how things did go, and of how things will probably go in the future. The more interesting side has to do with the interrogation of reality. We’re always experiencing history, and at the same time, we’re imagining these other societies that we might have been. It’s a way of criticizing life and ourselves, a way of asserting that things don’t necessarily have to be the way they are, and breaking down the specifics of that. How is society organized? What do we value? How do we treat each other? How do we choose to live? People have lived in totally different ways, and could do so again. It makes everything vibrate with a kind of possibility.

There’s currently an exhibition of Shaker craft at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and a new Shaker Museum is being built in Chatham, New York. I wonder if curiosity about the Shakers ebbs and flows as people’s feelings about the country change, and if this current wave is happening because people feel anxiety about the way things are going.

The other two times I know of when that happened were the early 30s—right after the Great Depression, which would make sense—and in the 60s, when there was a flowering of interest in utopias and utopian thinking. And certainly, it would make sense right now: I mean, we’re having this conversation the day after the UFC fight on the White House lawn, so the temptation to withdraw into a life of beauty and simplicity and prayer is very strong. I felt it when I was at Shaker Village. The peacefulness of it is so alluring. And the orderliness of life—that you eat at a certain time, you work at a certain time, and you’re all doing it together in a kind of dance. Life is being lived by the hour, and there’s a harmony to it.

Are there parallels you can draw between the Shakers and the utopia that Christian Priber envisioned?

The Shakers are an offshoot of the Quakers, with more eccentric ideas in a few respects. And Priber was from a place in Saxony called Zittau, that was very close to the Moravian commune in Herrnhut, one of the great utopian experiments of the first half of the 18th century—the Quakers and the Moravians drew inspiration from each other, or from common sources. Priber was secular, but he was tolerant of all religions, and I think he would have seen a lot to admire in the Shakers: the uniformity of dress, the attention to architecture, communal farming and gardening, socialism in terms of the economy they lived by.

Mother Ann Lee was born in the very year Priber went into the backcountry to live with the Cherokees and tried to establish his Enlightenment Republic, which he called Paradise. So the same energies were animating both of those utopian experiments, and a lot of others. That’s one of the reasons I love that period in history—these experiments were just popping off in every direction.

For instance, a lot of people are surprised to learn how utopian the Georgia colony was in the beginning. It was founded right at the same time, in the mid-1730s, by James Oglethorpe, and his original charter for the colony was actually criticized for being “too much utopian.” No slavery, no rum, religious tolerance, even restrictions on the amount of land people could own. It was quite radical.

Was travel a big part of your life when you were growing up?

We traveled as much as the next family—road trips, mainly. Going up to northern Michigan every summer to a chautauqua, where my family has always stayed (and which itself has a very utopian vibe, when I think about it). Once I got into my twenties and thirties, I became some kind of ersatz gonzo magazine reporter, and did that for many years, so I was constantly traveling. It was wonderful in some ways. I saw the world. It also took years off my life. It’s a really hard lifestyle. Trains and planes, and working on pieces in hotels in the middle of the night, trying to make deadlines in a different time zone. Now I’m moving into another mode with travel, and it’s nice. A little slower, a little more deliberate.

Is there a place you’ve traveled to, either professionally or personally, that especially resonated with you?

West Africa, where I went when I was 16 on a foreign-exchange trip. It’s probably the place I fantasize about going back to most often. And then Peru. My wife and I lived there for a while after we got out of college and she got a Fulbright to study in Lima. We talk pretty often about going back to Peru, especially places like Cajamarca, Arequipa, Cuzco, the cities in the mountains that—I want to say they’re otherworldly. I realize that’s an objectifying term. They’re not otherworldly to the people who live there, although in some ways they are that too! Because they’re spiritualized cities. The clearest way I can ask myself this question is: What places do you dream about the most? And that’s Senegal and Peru.

Is there anything you collect when you travel?

It’s funny, I’ve never been much of a collector, partly because I’m not good at it. You have to be organized. I tend to break things and lose things, and forget what order they should be in. So I haven’t been good about acquiring objects in the different places I’ve been, in that way where, when you’re showing somebody around the house, you can say, “Oh, I got this in Iceland” or whatever. If I collect one thing, it’s stones. I have a bowl with rocks or pieces of brick and things I’ve picked up in different places. Old glass bottles, stuff like that.

There’s not much that can go wrong with rocks.

Exactly. I don’t feel any anxiety.

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