Americans may have fallen short of President Biden's July 4 vaccination goal, but by most measures, we should be thankful for how far we've come in the past year.

The big picture: Last July 4, many Americans were hunkering down in their backyards with small cookouts, and travel was way down. This year, most adults have at least some vaccine protection, travel is back up, and most Americans are ready to move on with their lives.

In his famous Independence Day oration of 1852, Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?” If we turn that around and ask, “What to the Fourth of July were African Americans?,” we can only answer: “A lot.”

African Americans played a crucial, if often overlooked, role in their White owners’ and neighbors’ decision to declare independence from Britain.

As this great nation celebrates its 245th birthday, it is time to fight back, hard, against the critical race theory and 1619 Project lies claiming that the founding was motivated largely by racism and slavery.

When even the National Archives, the repository of the original Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, wastes huge amounts of time and money in a mendacious initiative adopting the 1619 Project’s slander of the founding and of the nation, it is clear that the battle for the truth of our nation’s origins must be joined.