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The Constitution, like the Declaration, came together in the summer, in Philadelphia, in what we now call Independence Hall. The two documents were debated and approved in the same room, but 11 years apart. And the experience of those 11 years confirmed the difficulty of the challenge that the Declaration had sketched out. They were seven years of war and four years of peace. The war was fought for self-government, and against abuses of power by a government that was not sufficiently accountable to the people it governed. The revolution came to be understood, at least by the end of the war, as what we might call a struggle for democracy. And the forms of government established in the states during and after the war tended to be radically democratic: Strong legislatures kept close to the people, in several cases through annual elections, and a kind of thoroughgoing majority rule.

The turmoil of the late 1960s and 1970s had left scars: assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. Trust was eroding among Americans, and many felt that the country’s best days were behind it. Economic stagnation compounded that doubt. Stagflation and soaring interest rates made it difficult for families to plan for the future. Internationally, events like the Iran hostage crisis and Soviet expansion into Afghanistan contributed to a sense that America had lost its footing. Reagan was acutely aware of the social, economic, and geopolitical dysfunction and how it affected the American psyche but was undeterred by the difficulties of the moment. He believed that a reawakening of the American spirit and clear thinking could end the cycle of decline. His vision was not a denial of our problems, but a refusal to let America be defined by them.

Americans are experiencing a great deal of social and political trouble right now because we do not know what we want, cannot agree about what we should want, and know only that what the other side wants must be the wrong thing. But if you travel around the rest of the world, it is easy to see what they want. The éminences grises of Western Europe, the boomer welfare-staters, want to be Portland, “the place where people in their 20s go to retire,” or, even better, to be Austin in the 1990s, where young people went to retire for a bit and then start tech companies that would make them billionaires. (The Europeans are really feeling the great missed opportunity of the turn of the century.) The elderly men who run China want to take over the American role as the world’s big dog. A bunch of graybeards in the Muslim world dream of a new caliphate or maybe some form of state-capitalist techno-monarchy that will give the Gulf states the dynamism and energy to finally do something interesting with all that oil money instead of building the seventh Louis Vuitton boutique in Dubai. But the young and the hungry around the world, from India to Ukraine, want something different: They want choices and agency and fun and freedom that may not look exactly like our version of it but that is freedom nonetheless. They want to rock.

“Big Bill” Knudsen was president of General Motors, the greatest industrial corporation in the world. But he was no ordinary corporate manager. A Danish immigrant, he had worked and fought his way up from the Brooklyn shipyards (where he was the reigning heavyweight boxing champion) to work for Henry Ford and help redesign the automobile mass production line that made Ford famous. From Ford, Knudsen had moved on to Chevrolet, where he turned GM’s loss leader into the company that would outsell Ford nearly every year from 1931 to 1986—and make GM the global industrial colossus. If anyone could figure out how to arm America to confront the Axis powers, it was GM’s president. … Knudsen’s family and colleagues were shocked. It didn’t make sense to move to Washington; America wasn’t at war yet. Besides, Knudsen was a Republican and FDR a progressive Democrat who had excoriated big business and capitalism ever since he took office in 1933. “My country has been good to me,” was Knudsen’s answer, “and I want to pay it back.”

On the morning of November 14, 1960, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges walked toward the doors of her new school in New Orleans wearing a neatly pressed dress and carrying her school supplies, surrounded by four federal marshals as she climbed the steps. Ruby was the first black student to attend the formerly all-white William Frantz Elementary School after the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Brown famously ruled that separate schools for students based on race violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. But it had not been an immediate panacea to racial segregation. The decision had been issued six years earlier, a few months before Ruby was born. Only now, under significant federal pressure, were many Southern schools finally allowing black students in. And they were still coming up with new ways to resist.

With the 15th Amendment’s statement that voting rights could not be “abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” black men were enfranchised while the opportunity for universal suffrage crumbled. Effectively, the amendment left women’s voting rights in the hands of the states. Before finding its way to state legislatures, however, women’s suffrage got its start in the territories. By the time the 15th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870, women in the territory of Wyoming already had access to the voting rights that prominent suffragists like Cady Stanton had only dreamed of. Wyoming granted women’s suffrage in December 1869, and Utah followed just two months later. In the West, movements for women’s suffrage were beset by their own factional divides. Although radicals, Spiritualists, and free-love activists clashed with socially conservative temperance activists throughout the late-19th century, they all agreed that women should have access to the ballot.

A nation is a little bit like a marriage. Things are bound to get bumpy. There are bound to be fallings out. And yet the act of remembering together can also be an act of reconciliation. Remember who we hoped we would be? Remember what it was that made us love each other? These sentiments are at the heart of Lincoln’s constant insistence that we are not enemies, but friends. The fact that we have a country at all today is in part owing to the extraordinary refusal of Lincoln to take an eye for an eye. In his second inaugural, after a war that had brutalized so much, he refused to cast judgment on his enemies. Acknowledging the sin of slavery, and even his own part in it, he still regarded others with mercy. “Let us judge not, that we not be judged.” How did a nation which snapped in half, which went through years of animosity, cruelty, and bloodshed, make up and come back together? Part of the key is in the final words of that same speech: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Far from being a mere preface or sideshow to intellectual ferment and political upheavals in Europe, the American Revolution is the event that transformed the Enlightenment from an abstract intellectual exercise into, in George Washington’s words, a real-world, tangible “experiment.” Because all ideas have long histories and pre-histories, we can trace the roots of the American Revolution to previous societies and events—from Ancient Greece and Rome (the wellsprings of democratic and republican theory) to the Glorious Revolution (which limited royal authority and elevated the power and legitimacy of parliament)—but the truth is that the American Revolution was less a continuation of existing trends and more a culmination of them. It summoned ideas and aspirations into the political realm and translated abstractions into actions. Sentiments were hardened into structures, and temporary principles became permanent commitments.

Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.