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For more than two and a half centuries, the concept of unity has stood as one of the most foundational — and most contested — ideals at the heart of the American experiment. It is woven into the very name of the nation: the *United* States of America. It echoes in the nation’s founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence’s opening assertion of collective self-determination to the Constitution’s iconic opening words “We the people,” and the Pledge of Allegiance’s promise of “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” It is inscribed on every U.S. coin and one-dollar bill, in the Latin phrase *E Pluribus Unum* — “out of many, one.”

Yet for all its centrality to American identity, this long-held aspiration has always walked a fine line between optimism and unrealized potential, triumph and failure. It has persisted as a guiding north star through generations of struggle, and that struggle continues to unfold today, as the nation grapples anew with what unity actually means in a deeply diverse society. In an era of sharp political and social polarization, scholars are revisiting how the idea of national unity has evolved since 1776, and why the question of who belongs in “one nation” remains unresolved more than two centuries later. As Northwestern University history professor Daniel Immerwahr notes, this is a question every society across the globe must ultimately confront.

## I. The Origins of a “United” Nation: Ideals and Compromises From the Start
From the revolutionary moment that birthed the United States, the nation’s founders framed unity as the non-negotiable backbone of the new experiment in self-governance. Unlike the European monarchies the 13 colonies had broken away from, the American system would be rooted not in divine rule of a single king, but in the “consent of the governed” — a collective agreement that bound diverse former colonies into a single body politic.

As George Washington emphasized in his farewell address at the end of his second and final presidential term, the survival and success of the new nation depended on a lasting, unshakable commitment to national union. “It is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it … indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest,” he told the young nation.

But even at the nation’s founding, when leaders stitched 13 separate, self-governing colonies into a single federal structure, a shared definition of unity was far from settled. The founders’ high-minded rhetoric of equality and collective purpose stood in stark contrast to the deep exclusions baked into the new nation: they enshrined chattel slavery, denied political and civil rights to women, Indigenous peoples, and non-white populations, and limited full citizenship to a narrow segment of society.

Today, that core ambiguity remains. Does *E Pluribus Unum* mean that diverse perspectives, identities, and experiences can blend to create a nation stronger than its individual parts? Or does it demand uniformity — that “unity” requires all people to align around a single set of beliefs, identities, and customs to belong?

Like any deep national aspiration, unity has never been achieved in a single milestone moment. Just as personal growth is built from small, consistent daily choices rather than one New Year’s resolution, a nation’s character is forged in the everyday work of living up to its stated ideals. There are no quick fixes, and no final victories.

## II. Ideals Versus Lived Reality: Centuries of Division and Struggle
Unity has stood as a core American ideal for 250 years, but the lived experience of the nation tells a different story: there has never been a single, homogeneous America, where all people shared equal access to power, opportunity, and prosperity. That gap between aspiration and reality existed at the nation’s founding, and it persists in 21st-century America.

Immerwahr notes that the United States has long had an unusually volatile history when it comes to answering the core question of unity: where to draw the line between insiders who belong and outsiders who are excluded. “What’s interesting about the United States in this regard is how changeable and nonobvious some of the answers to those questions are,” he explains.

Divisions in American life have taken many forms across generations. Some are rooted in geography, from the persistent rural-urban divide to regional differences shaped by climate and topography. Others are cultural: divides between native-born populations and new immigrants, between communities of different religious and linguistic backgrounds. Economic inequality has always separated rich and poor, shaping vastly different life experiences across class lines.

But some divides have been outright moral travesties, rooted in systemic oppression that contradicts the very ideal of unity the nation claims to uphold. For centuries, enslaved African people and their descendants were forced into chattel bondage to build wealth for white landowners; even after the abolition of slavery, legal systemic racism segregation and discrimination endured into the 20th century, and its harms echo through American society today. Indigenous nations across the continent saw their populations decimated by violence and disease as white settlers expanded westward, their lands seized, and their cultural identities systematically erased through brutal government forced assimilation policies designed to impose a narrow vision of “unity.” For generations, women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups have been barred from full citizenship and equal opportunity on the basis of their identity.

Across every era of American history, however, excluded groups have mobilized to close the gap between the nation’s stated ideals and its lived reality. Through mass protest, legal challenge, and grassroots organizing, movements for equality have expanded access to voting, education, economic opportunity, and civil rights to more and more Americans — and they have done so by leaning into the founding ideals of unity and equality themselves.

Eileen Cheng, a history professor at Sarah Lawrence College, explains that this framework gave marginalized organizers a powerful language to challenge exclusion while still claiming their place as Americans. “It provided a language for the groups that were challenging these exclusions to draw on … invoking the ideals of the Revolution and the Declaration and saying, ‘Look, this is what the nation is supposed to be about,’” she says. “They could challenge the system and yet claim that they were the true Americans.”

## III. Reimagining Unity For a Divided Era: What Does It Actually Mean To Be United?
As an ideal, unity remains inherently abstract, and Americans have never agreed on what a truly unified nation should look like. Does unity require uniformity of belief, identity, and culture? Can a nation be united even when its people hold deeply differing views, and sit on different political sides? Is absolute uniformity even desirable in a vibrant, raucous democracy?

Around the world, different nations have arrived at wildly different answers to these questions. Some enshrine a single official language and national religion; others recognize multiple cultural and linguistic identities. The United States, for its part, has never adopted an official language at the federal level, and its citizenship model is rooted in shared commitment to a set of founding principles rather than shared ethnic or cultural lineage.

Paul Wachtel, a psychology professor at the City College of New York, argues that tension between national unity and group difference is inevitable in any diverse society. “There are always tensions between the unity and the separateness,” he says. “There’s no society that is just one or just the other … what’s really most essential is that we learn how to negotiate those tensions.”

The United States encountered this reality almost from its birth. The U.S. Constitution, the framework that still governs the nation today, was actually the second attempt at building a federal government. The first, the Articles of Confederation, prioritized state power over federal unity, and quickly proved too weak to address the young nation’s challenges — leading to the Constitutional Convention and the stronger federal system adopted in 1787.

Unlike many older nations that built their national identity around centuries of shared cultural and geographic history, the United States was purpose-built from its founding as an experiment in collective governance built on shared principles rather than shared lineage. As Immerwahr puts it: “What it is to be of the United States is to adhere to a set of principles rather than to have a certain kind of lineage. Sometimes that makes the United States remarkably open, and then sometimes that gets the leaders of the United States in all kinds of weird contradictions as they try to explain why they’re doing some forms of inclusion and not others.”

Over 250 years, the nation’s approach to balancing unity and difference has shifted constantly. Migration policy has swung between open borders that welcomed waves of new arrivals and restrictive laws that barred entire groups based on origin. Political disagreement, once seen by many founders as a threat to national unity, has become a core feature of American political life. Groups once labeled as dangerous “others” have later been welcomed into the national mainstream, and groups once accepted can be pushed to the margins in new eras of tension.

Cindy Kam, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, notes that the boundaries of “who belongs” are never fixed — they are actively shaped by power holders in every era. “What have we learned over the last 250 years is that things change,” she says. “We are inclined to be social animals, but what those groups are is culturally constructed. So political elites, social elites, cultural elites, they do that work in identifying what the groups are, who is part of ‘us’ and who is a part of the ‘other.’”

Today, decades of demographic, technological, and economic change have made the debate over American unity more urgent than ever. Many observers frame current rampant political polarization as an unprecedented crisis, but Cheng says that deep division is actually far more consistent with the nation’s origins than many Americans realize. “This polarization, people talk about it like it’s a new thing. But I think it’s really a return back to the way that we were at the beginning of the country,” she says. “It’s not like this kind of linear development where we’re growing more and more accepting of difference. I think it’s up and down.”

This reporting is part of an Associated Press special series marking the 250th anniversary of the United States.

ATLANTA — A 26-year-old British immigrant and former U.S. Navy service member who obtained American citizenship in 2022 is now facing serious criminal charges for a string of coordinated violent attacks that left three people dead or injured, including a U.S. Department of Homeland Security employee, and spread fear across residential and commercial areas of Atlanta’s northern and eastern suburbs.

Olaolukitan Adon Abel, whose name is documented in multiple spelling variations across official court and government records, stands accused of two counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault, along with additional firearms violations, for the series of shootings and stabbings that unfolded in the early hours of Monday. Authorities confirmed the attacks, which spanned nearly 20 miles across three different jurisdictions, are definitively linked, and at least one of the victims is believed to have been targeted at random.

The wave of violence began shortly after 1 a.m. in Decatur, where local police responded to reports of gunfire near a neighborhood restaurant and found 31-year-old Prianna Weathers suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Despite urgent transport to a regional trauma center, Weathers died from her injuries, DeKalb County Police Chief Gregory Padrick confirmed.

Roughly one hour later, roughly 19 kilometers northwest of the first attack in Brookhaven, a 49-year-old homeless man was shot multiple times while sleeping outside of a local grocery store. Brookhaven Police Chief Brandon Gurley said the unnamed man remains in critical condition at an area hospital as of Tuesday.

The final attack was discovered more than five hours later, approximately 16 kilometers south of the Brookhaven incident in Panthersville, where 40-year-old Lauren Bullis, a DHS Office of Inspector General employee, was found with gunshot and stab wounds while out walking her dog around 7 a.m. Bullis died at the scene, Padrick said.

Bullis, who served DHS for years in multiple roles including auditor and innovation team lead, has been remembered by colleagues and family as a deeply kind, generous public servant. “She brought a genuine sense of care to her colleagues each day,” DHS wrote in an official social media tribute following her death. Her family added in a statement that Bullis loved running, reading and traveling, and “her warmth and generosity touched everyone surrounding her.” Ashley Toillion, a fellow DHS auditor based in Denver, called Bullis “the nicest, sweetest, most encouraging person I’ve ever met.”

Court and military records paint a troubling picture of the suspect’s history in the U.S. armed forces and prior run-ins with law enforcement. Adon Abel enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 2020, and was most recently stationed with the Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron in Coronado, California, where he held the rank of petty officer and even received a Navy “E” Ribbon for superior performance in battle readiness.

But court records from California show Adon Abel pleaded guilty just last October to charges of assaulting two police officers with a deadly weapon and attacking a third civilian while stationed at the Coronado base. Additional court records from Chatham County, Georgia, show that a person matching Adon Abel’s name and birth date pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of sexual battery in June 2024. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a member of President Donald Trump’s second cabinet, called the deadly attacks “acts of pure evil” and publicly raised questions about how Adon Abel was granted U.S. citizenship in 2022, during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration. Under longstanding U.S. immigration rules, people convicted of most violent felonies are strictly barred from obtaining naturalized citizenship, and it remains unclear whether Adon Abel had any criminal convictions on his record prior to his 2022 citizenship approval.

Following his arrest, Adon Abel faces charges including malice murder, aggravated assault, and unlawful firearms possession. He waived his right to an initial court appearance on Tuesday, and the public defender assigned to his case has not yet responded to requests for comment on the charges.

Long celebrated as one of Europe’s most digitally advanced nations, Sweden is now undergoing a dramatic reversal of its decades-long push to integrate screens into every level of classroom learning. The country’s current right-wing coalition government, elected in 2022, has launched a high-profile initiative under the slogan ‘från skärm till pärm’ — ‘from screen to binder’ — that prioritizes traditional pen-and-paper learning, physical textbooks and analogue tools in an effort to reverse years of declining national literacy scores. This policy has sparked fierce debate across education, tech and political circles, dividing experts, students and stakeholders over what balance of analogue and digital learning best serves Sweden’s youth.

Sweden’s rapid adoption of digital education tools began more than 15 years ago. Laptops entered mainstream classroom use across the country in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and official data from 2015 shows roughly 80% of students at state-funded municipal high schools had individual access to a personal digital device by that point. In 2019, the previous Social Democrat-led administration went a step further, mandating tablet use in pre-schools as part of a broader strategy to equip even the youngest Swedes for a fully digital workforce and personal life.

But that era of universal digital expansion has come to an abrupt end under the new government. Joar Forsell, education spokesperson for the Liberal Party — whose leader heads Sweden’s education ministry — made clear the administration’s core goal: ‘We’re trying, actually, to get rid of screens as much as possible. With higher ages in school you might use them a little bit more, but with lower ages, or in school, I don’t think we should use screens at all.’

Policy changes have already rolled out across the country. Starting in 2025, pre-schools are no longer required to integrate digital tools into their curriculum, and tablets are no longer distributed to children under the age of two. Later this year, a full ban on mobile phones in schools — even for educational purposes — will go into effect. To support the transition to analogue learning, the government has allocated more than 2.1 billion Swedish krona ($200 million) in grants for schools to purchase new physical textbooks and print teaching materials, and a revised national curriculum centered on textbook-based instruction is scheduled to launch in 2028.

The policy shift directly responds to Sweden’s sliding performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the OECD’s global benchmark for core academic skills. Once a top-performing nation in global education rankings, Sweden saw its PISA scores plummet in 2012. After a short period of modest recovery, the country recorded another significant drop in reading and mathematics scores in 2022. While Sweden still scores slightly above the OECD average, it now trails peer Nordic nations including Denmark and Finland, as well as the UK and the U.S., in literacy. Alarmingly, 24% of 15- to 16-year-old Swedish students fail to reach a basic level of reading comprehension.

Government supporters and some researchers argue that excessive screen use is the core cause of these declining results. Dr. Sissela Nutley, a neuroscientist affiliated with Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, is one of the leading academic voices backing the shift. She notes that screen-based learning creates constant distractions, as students are distracted by peer activity on other devices. ‘There’s been an increased awareness of the disruption that technology is causing in classrooms,’ Nutley explained, adding that a growing body of international research shows digital text reading impairs information processing for children, and heavy screen exposure may negatively impact brain development in younger learners. Forsell echoed this view, arguing: ‘Reading real books and writing on real paper, and counting with real numbers on real paper, is much better if you want kids to get the knowledge they need.’

The OECD, however, has taken a more nuanced stance. A January 2024 OECD report on Swedish education concluded that, overall, Swedish students derive net benefits from access to digital learning tools. The report did acknowledge the widespread problem of digital distraction in Swedish classrooms, and found that heavy, unstructured device use in math classes correlated with lower test scores — though even those students still outperformed peers who had no access to digital tools at all. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education, warned against drawing simple cause-and-effect conclusions, but noted that Sweden’s earlier tech adoption was unusually unplanned compared to other countries: ‘It just put a lot of devices and technology into classrooms without clear pedagogical intent, without clear goalposts.’

The government’s policy has drawn particularly sharp criticism from Sweden’s powerful tech and edtech sectors. Jannie Jeppesen, CEO of industry trade group Swedish Edtech Industry and a former teacher, warned that a wholesale shift to analogue learning will leave Swedish students underprepared for the modern workforce. ‘Everybody needs digital basic skills in order to enter the workforce,’ Jeppesen said, pointing to a recent EU estimate that 90% of all jobs will require baseline digital skills in the near future.

Jeppesen also warned that the policy threatens Sweden’s status as Europe’s leading tech unicorn hub per capita — home to global successes including Spotify and AI legal platform Legora. If Swedish schools fail to train students in core digital skills, she argues, growing tech companies will relocate to other regions where they can access a skilled workforce: ‘These types of companies will move elsewhere if they can’t find the right IT competences in Sweden.’

Critics also point to growing concerns around AI literacy and equity. While the government has announced plans to introduce AI lessons in secondary schools, many education experts argue that excluding AI education from primary school curricula will widen the digital divide between wealthy and low-income students. Professor Linnéa Stenliden, of Linköping University’s Department of Behavioral Sciences, explains that children from affluent households are far more likely to get access to AI learning support from their parents at home, leaving lower-income students further behind. ‘Without such measures, younger children from richer families, whose parents are more likely to be able to help them understand how to use AI tools, will gain an advantage,’ Stenliden warned.

Forsell rejects these criticisms, arguing that basic literacy and numeracy skills must come before advanced digital training, and denies the policy will widen inequality: ‘You can only give people the opportunities that inequality is taking away from them, by giving them proper education.’ Jeppesen dismisses this framing as populist, arguing that the focus on digital versus analogue learning distracts from more pressing issues impacting Swedish education outcomes, including unequal distribution of educational resources and inconsistent teaching quality highlighted in a March 2024 report from Sweden’s National Education Agency.

On the ground at a Nacka high school just outside Stockholm, where the policy shift is already being implemented, student opinions mirror the national divide. Final-year student Sophie, 18, says the shift is already visible in daily classes: ‘I now go home from school with new books and papers often. One teacher has started printing all the texts that we use during the lesson, while a digital learning platform in maths lessons has been swapped out for textbook-only teaching.’

Eighteen-year-old Alexis, another final-year student, supports the change, saying he has watched younger generations lose focus due to constant internet access: ‘The internet has kind of taken over the younger generations, and I’ve noticed them kind of lose focus easier. I don’t want my younger siblings to use digital tools in school as much as my generation did.’ But 19-year-old Jasmine disagrees, arguing that digital learning better reflects the reality of modern life: ‘Let’s focus more on computers. Because if we are being realistic, the whole world is using computers.’

As the policy rolls out across the country over the next three years, all sides will be watching closely to see whether returning to pen and paper can reverse Sweden’s declining literacy — or whether it will leave a generation of Swedish students ill-prepared for an increasingly digital global economy.