The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. In the inaugural volume of an eight-book series, renowned historians and political scientists explore what the contested idea of democracy meant to those who participated in the American Revolution. For some, democracy represented a particular way to order government, while others understood democracy to be a transformative principle that would serve as the philosophical bedrock of not just the new republic's political institutions but its social and cultural ones as well.

Examining the democratic culture that was born out of the American Revolution can help us understand the framework within which we continue to debate the structure and purpose of the system of government that binds us together today.