Coming soon: More, America

Twenty-Five (More) Founders of the United States of America

As the United States hurtles toward its 250th birthday, this new series, More, America, rejects a choreographed anniversary of flags, founders, and self-congratulation. Instead, More, America serves as counterprogramming: a challenge to thin patriotism that treats critique as betrayal, and offers a case for a thicker kind of patriotism that insists America live up to its own promises.

Over twenty-five weeks, More, America profiles twenty-five founders—one from each decade since 1776—who demanded a better nation or exposed its deepest contradictions. Some worked within America’s moral traditions, like Phillis Wheatley and the Pequot Methodist minister William Apess in the 1820s to civil rights icons like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin in the 1950s. Others, like Denmark Vesey (c. 1767–1822), imagined freedom through rupture; still others, like the Ute leader Wakara (c. 1815-1855), shaped the nation from beyond its borders, revealing U.S. expansion as imperial succession rather than heroic settlement.

Together, these lives show that America was not founded once, in Philadelphia, but again and again—in attic rooms, borderlands, churches, prisons, and Native homelands.

As 2026 approaches, More, America asks a simple, yet unsettling question: not just who founded the United States, but who should count as a founder now—and what kind of country their legacies demand we become.