Roughly 40 miles from the Rose Bowl sits the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Ventura County’s Simi Valley. The library, which suffered appre
Roughly 40 miles from the Rose Bowl sits the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Ventura County’s Simi Valley. The library, which suffered appreciable injury in a wildfire final October, usually holds a daylong celebration on July Four that pulls between 3,500 and 4,500 folks.
“We’ve been doing this for over 20 years,” stated Melissa Giller, chief advertising and marketing officer on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Basis and Institute, including that July Four was President Reagan’s favourite vacation.
Daytime actions for kids abound, together with face-painting, water-balloon tosses and horseshoes. “Now we have an indoor part the place numerous look-alikes of our forefathers give 45-minute displays on their life,” Ms. Giller stated. An official Los Angeles Police Division band normally performs too.
This yr, the advertising and marketing crew began to brainstorm methods to shift the occasion on-line. It filmed Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln doppelgängers delivering monologues, and Boy Scout troops pledging allegiance to the flag from the library. Most of the arts and crafts actions — like coloring sheets and presidential bingo — could be downloaded on the library’s web site.
This system is about to run roughly two hours, and might be streamed on YouTube. “What we’re dropping is togetherness,” Ms. Giller stated. “However what we’re gaining, the Reagan library as a model, is we’re really reaching extra folks now than we’ve ever reached earlier than. We’ve been in a position to entice individuals who in any other case won’t be capable to come.”
After all, there’s the likelihood that dropping traditions on a vacation like July Four supplies the prospect to reimagine how People outline nationhood, what this nation symbolizes, and what’s even price celebrating.
“Its actually in regards to the ritual, and it’s not likely in regards to the that means of the vacation itself,” stated Nina Eliasoph, a sociology professor on the College of Southern California who focuses on political and cultural sociology.