Shocking July 4 poll finds nearly half of Americans don’t know what they’re celebrating on America’s 250th

Kelly Phillips Erb is a Forbes senior writer who covers tax.

When Richard Woo first arrived in the United States from Taiwan, China, as an international student nearly five decades ago, he remembers a United States that embodied opportunity, optimism and affordability.

In the 250 years since the US declared its independence from Great Britain, the nation has grown from a sparsely populated collection of settlements scattered along the Atlantic coast into a global power spread over the breadth of a continent and beyond.

Two hundred and fifty years ago this weekend, 13 American colonies declared themselves independent of the British crown, setting in motion an experiment in self-government that would go on to remake the modern world.