Seen from above, the land looks different. Anyone glancing out of the window on the approach to a mid-sized American airport at first makes out no landscape, only a kind of grid: cornfields in exact squares, roads running for dozens of kilometres without a single bend, parcel boundaries drawn by surveyors who never laid eyes on the river or hill they cut through. This ground, it’s clear, was measured before it was settled. Probably sold, too, before it was ever walked on. That matter-of-factness from a bird’s-eye view sits oddly with the word this continent has been marketed under for five hundred years: promise.
Even the name has always been a selling point: Amerigo Vespucci, the navigator the continent owes its name to, described the new land in letters to his patron as lusher and more welcoming than any other known part of the world – a fine piece of copy, one might say, five hundred years before the word existed.
What began as a refuge for the persecuted became the greatest brand of the modern age: the United States, the promise of freedom, packaged as an idea and sold on, first to emigrants, later to an entire world drawing its films, its burgers, and increasingly today its AI systems from this one country. Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, it’s worth a look at the small print of that promise.
250 Candles
On 4 July 2026, Washington celebrated: gun salutes, a new commemorative coin, a car race around the National Mall, a “Great American State Fair”, plus parts of the football World Cup, held in the country that same summer. A bipartisan commission had prepared the festivities since 2016; in 2025 much of the funding and framing authority passed to a new working group close to the White House. Two hundred and fifty years of independence are, in any country that old, a date worth pausing over.
© Steven Pavlov, 2026-07-04, 4th of July Festival (Auburn, Washington), 122827, adjusted colours, CC BY-SA 4.0
Yet the anniversary falls in a period of mixed American sentiment: pride in what has been achieved, but also unease. Commentators at home and abroad speak of a creeping erosion of democratic institutions, of an executive branch expanding its powers, of a Supreme Court that, in the same year, weakens a core piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Even American opinion pages note how hard it is to mark the round birthday without reservation. At the very celebration of the founding document, it is up for debate how robust the rights it guarantees still are – and who holds authority over the nation’s founding myth.
The Cartographer of Control
This question is taken up, from the outside and with professional distance, by the Austrian architect Theo Deutinger. Born in 1971, the founder and head of The Department has for years combined architecture with cartography and social analysis. He became known in 2018 for “Handbook of Tyranny”, a survey of the architecture of control: refugee camps, prisons, border fences, drawn as floor plans and made legible in their quiet cruelty. “Ultimate Atlas”, a reckoning of the planet’s resources, and “Joy and Fear”, a report on the impositions of the present, followed. All three books, like the new one, appeared with Lars Müller Publishers in Switzerland, whose list has long gathered non-fiction on human rights, democracy and global inequality.
© Nicole Hettegger
For the 250th anniversary of American independence, Deutinger has now turned this cartographic eye on the United States itself. “All About U.S.: 250 Years of the United States of America” presents itself as a birthday gift from Europe – handed over by the very continent the United States broke away from not long ago. The title plays on a double meaning: “U.S.” is an abbreviation and a personal pronoun at once, a book about the United States that, in the same breath, is always also about “us”. Seven chapters, numbered like exhibition halls, carry titles such as “Promised Land”, “We the People” or “Stand Your Ground”. Deutinger assembles maps, timelines and statistics, instead of a continuous text, into what he calls a “pointillist catalogue” of the United States: a country reconstructed from nothing but individual measurements, printed in American letter format and in the official flag colours Old Glory Red and Old Glory Blue – the material choice becomes part of the investigation. His standpoint remains unashamedly European, probably serving the long view more than it hurts it. But who can really judge that?
The Reckoning
The reckoning that emerges from Deutinger’s measurements begins with the founding myth itself: the territory the first settlers found empty and free was in fact inhabited, and the claim to open land was settled with the Indigenous nations, whose territory shrank over two centuries by exactly the measure the Republic grew. The same surveying grid that laid the young Republic across the continent, from Atlantic to Pacific, followed hard on the heels of the new borders – one map grows, the other shrinks, both printed on the same spread. Shortly after comes the next reckoning: between 1619 and the end of the slave trade, millions were abducted from Africa; their labour formed the economic foundation on which the young state grew – a state in whose political shaping they had no part for a further two centuries.
That share was claimed, quite concretely, by a man named Thomas Mundy Peterson – entry number 24 in Deutinger’s opening chapter “America’s Firsts”, a numbered chronicle of American premieres. On 31 March 1870, he walks into the town hall of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, a day after the Fifteenth Amendment has taken effect nationwide, ending the tie between voting rights and skin colour. The matter at hand that day is only local – the redrafting of the town charter – but Peterson casts his vote as the first recorded Black voter in American history. A white voter watching him tears up his own ballot. The citizens of Perth Amboy see it differently and raise money for a gold medal in Peterson’s honour – a single ballot, and the beginning of a long, uneven line. Voting rights have since been fought for in several waves, from women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and just as often cut back, most recently in 2026, when the Supreme Court weakened a core piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Of all decades, it was the 1970s – while the death penalty stood suspended – that saw some of the most remarkable achievements in American history cluster together: the end of racial segregation, the end of the Cold War, the invention of the internet. The country was, Deutinger notes, probably more content with itself in this decade than in any other of the past 250 years.
The present shows a more unsettled picture: self-defence laws are now in force in 38 states, purpose-built furniture for concealing handguns in the living room is commercially available, and the death penalty, long abolished across most of Europe, remains in force in a good half of the states. Wealth is concentrating: the top one per cent today holds more capital than the bottom half of the population combined, while seven technology companies – called simply “The Magnificent Seven” in the book – reach a market value exceeding the output of entire continents.
That same country has declared its popular culture the global standard with a nonchalance few others match: Hollywood, fast food, superhero characters. But the most unsettling pattern only becomes visible looking back over 250 years: the United States, which after 1945 helped found the United Nations, NATO and the World Health Organization, is withdrawing from several of these institutions in its anniversary year, or considering it. The country has known this pattern before: after the First World War it withdrew in similar fashion, before becoming, after 1945, the defining architect of the very international order from which it now distances itself.
The Footprint in the Moon Dust
At the end of his book, Deutinger reproduces the footprint Buzz Aldrin left in the moon dust in 1969 – the last frontier the United States has pushed. That promise, he writes in his afterword, was never tied to a particular place, but to the idea that there is always a next place to follow. This explains why the country is so hard to pin down to a single state, in both the positive and the negative sense: both the promise of progress and its current disruption appear as a mid-point in a movement that is still under way.
Anyone looking at the footprint sees no final landing. Only a single step, still missing its second. Nothing more. The grid seen from above the cornfields and the print on the moon belong to the same cartography: both attempts to capture something barely measurable in numbers and lines. Whether the promise ends up an honoured pledge or a warning cannot be read off any map; it is decided, as it was 250 years ago, where the surveying ends and the actual land begins.
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