To Alexander

Chapter One: The Year
If permitted the historical license to stretch the definition of a year, then the fifteenth months between the shots fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776 can justifiably claim to be both the most consequential and strangest year in American history.

But the design of the political foundation was ingenious in its combination of stability and agility, most especially its prudent placement of an expanding liberal mandate at the start that left room, up ahead, for an Abraham Lincoln and a Martin Luther King to join the list of founders. In that sense, perhaps the most creative act of the founding era was to make time as well as space an indispensable ally, in effect extending the founding moment everlastingly into the future.

Full title (2007): American creation : triumphs and tragedies at the founding of the republic / Joseph J. Ellis.