Credit... Lola Dupre Above my desk hangs an engraving of an island. It depicts a still-young city in a still-young nation.

Its cobblestone streets are lined with squat buildings, none taller than a church spire. No bridges or tunnels in sight, schooners and paddle-steam ferries crowd a shoreline bustling with working piers. This is New York City in 1851.

On Sept. 18 of that year, at the south end of the island, on Nassau Street, the newspaper we know today as The New York Times published its first issue. Put together in unfinished lofts by candlelight, it consisted of four dense, colorless pages of text. It sold for a penny.

On Friday, The New York Times turns 175. Over the past several months, I’ve found myself drawn to that engraving on my office wall. How unlikely it is that a newspaper born before indoor electricity — let alone cars, radio, telephones, planes and computers — is still here.

And how fortunate The Times is to have witnessed and chronicled and interrogated so much history in all those years. At The Times, we believe the job of a newspaper is to seek the truth, to help people understand the world and to hold the powerful to account. This means equipping people with the information they need to make decisions.

It means bonding our diverse communities with a fuller understanding of the lives, hopes and concerns of our neighbors. It means asking tough questions of government and business leaders on the public’s behalf. It means doing all this with an ironclad commitment to fairness, accuracy and independence — delivering the news, as our longstanding credo puts it, “impartially, without fear or favor.” It’s fitting therefore that the 175th anniversary of The Times arrives as we celebrate a bigger milestone: America’s 250th.

Truth, understanding and accountability are essential to a strong nation and a healthy democracy. Through 61,011 editions and some 15 million articles, the pages of The Times tell the story of America’s remarkable growth from an upstart nation of 24 million people to a global superpower of nearly 350 million. The pages announce the arrival of new technologies and track the upheavals that followed.

They chronicle battles for equal rights and the expansion of who is recognized as an American. They reveal the damage inflicted by wars, economic busts and moments of tragedy — and document the triumphs, economic booms and can-do resilience of a country that usually emerges stronger. Taken together, they’re the first draft of American history.

A new volume is added daily, a report so robust and wide-ranging that, on average, it could fill a 1,000-page book. The primary authors of this work are the reporters we’ve sent out to witness the world and to share what they have seen — not just establishing the facts but also wrapping them in context and explaining why they matter. We were there when the first shots of the Civil War rang out at Fort Sumter — our correspondent was promptly arrested as a Union spy — and then through the years of battles that followed, some of which President Abraham Lincoln’s war secretary read about in our pages before the generals could send word of them.

In the Roaring Twenties, our Wall Street reporting warned of recklessness in the markets, upsetting powerful financiers. After the country toppled into the Great Depression, a leading banker declared, “Our American community would have been better off today if it could have heeded that voice.” Our correspondents braved the battlefields of World War II; some lost their lives and others were taken prisoner in Germany, Italy and Japan. The Times, in turn, used its scarce government-rationed paper supplies to ensure all these reports reached the American public, turning away advertisements in the process.

In one of the darkest moments of the civil rights movement, one of our reporters was in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel when an assassin shot Martin Luther King Jr. “Write. Write, write down everything you see,” he told himself as ...