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PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE STEINMETZ, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION
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By David Beard
Amber waves of grain. Purple mountain majesty. Many people make the mistake that America The Beautiful, the nation’s unofficial anthem, harkens back to a simpler time.
“It does not,” historian Jill Lepore insists. “Americans of (poet) Katharine Lee Bates’s day were as politically divided as Americans of this day—arguably, they were more divided—over everything from immigration to land use to racial justice to economic inequality. And her America was similar to this America in more ways, too: It was wondrous and cruel, rich and poor, merciless and merciful, beautiful and ugly.”
Writing for Nat Geo, Lepore calls the poem “a window to another America, and also, in its way, a mirror to our own.”
Read the full story here. Related: See the America that unites.
And on this Fourth of July, stream National Geographic’s “America the Beautiful” series, narrated by actor Michael B. Jordan, on Disney+. Here’s a trailer.
(Pictured above, combines moving through a Kansas wheat field; below, Nat Geo Explorer Peter McBride captures a Grand Canyon hiker taking in the sunset.)
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