The promise of America: Founding Fathers didn’t just make liberty a democratic claim — they expected we would continue their argument

Source: New York Post

There’s a moment in our film “The American Revolution” when the historian Jane Kamensky, now president of Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, reflects on the lasting meaning of the war: “Everybody, on every side, including people denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for. ” That line captures something essential about the Revolution that can get lost beneath the familiar portraits and marble monuments. The Revolution was not only a war for independence but also an argument about possibility — who counted, who belonged, and whether so-called ordinary people could claim ownership over their own lives and their own future.