An initiative by the American Enterprise Institute aimed at reintroducing Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance.
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Democracy and the American Revolution
Essays on what the contested idea of democracy meant to participants in the American Revolution and how we should think about the democratic ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
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Capitalism and the American Revolution
Essays on how the market economy shaped the American Revolution and early republic and set off enduring debates on the relationship between economic dynamism and civic equality.
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Religion and the American Revolution
Essays on how the revolutionaries understood their cause as a spiritual struggle and worked to balance protections for religious communities with the rights of individual conscience.
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Natural Rights, the Common Good, and the American Revolution
Essays on the many ways in which the founding generation understood the “unalienable rights” immortalized by the Declaration of Independence and how they defined the relationship between the community and the individual.
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Slavery, Equality, and the American Revolution
Essays on how the American Revolution both perpetuated slavery and created the conditions for its abolition and on how the Declaration of Independence shaped the antislavery thought and politics of the nineteenth century.
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The American Revolution and America’s Role in the World
Essays on how the United States defined its place among the community of nations after declaring independence and how disputes over international entanglements shaped foreign policy in the early republic.
COMING SOON
The American Revolution and the Constitution
COMING SOON
The American Revolution in American History
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WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS
July 4, 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. It will be an occasion for celebration and for reflection on the origins and present state of the country. Our debates about the founding—its ideals and ambitions, its character and that of the society it launched—easily become divisive, but they also have the potential to help revitalize American society. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) offers a major intellectual and educational initiative to reacquaint Americans with the foundation of the American project—its promises and perils, successes and failures—and thereby point the way toward the renewal of American principles and institutions.
AEI’s “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” initiative is a multivolume essay series edited by Yuval Levin, Adam J. White, and John Yoo that studies issues central to the founding era through eight distinct themes. Convening leading scholars of history, political science, law, and other disciplines, the initiative tackles key questions to understanding the American Revolution’s legacy: How democratic was our revolution? How central was religious faith and leadership to the course of our political tradition? How might the founding generation’s economic thought inform today’s debates? How has the American understanding of equality, individual rights, and the common good changed over time? And how have we told the story of our founding at different points in our history?
By featuring serious scholarly engagement with these and other questions and controversies, this initiative helps readers appreciate the American tradition in its genuine complexity and build on it. The nation’s 250th birthday is a remarkable opportunity to draw on the past to have better conversations about what our nation stands for, what core commitments it entails and requires of its citizens, and other starting points for thinking fruitfully about our shared public life.
