The Radical Historian Who Made Bicentennial Junk a Treasure

A Yale Beinecke Library feature spotlights Jesse Lemisch’s Bicentennial Schlock collection—about 100 everyday, inexpensive artifacts from 1976 that captured the era’s over-the-top patriotism and anti-commercial critique. Born from Lemisch’s SUNY Buffalo class, the project pushed a bottom-up view of history and democratized the archival record, culminating in a 1981 donation to Yale. Today items such as a Ben Franklin kite and an all-American novelty condom illuminate how the Bicentennial mix of pop culture and politics shaped scholarship and public memory, even as debates about its meaning continue into the Semiquincentennial.