Founding Era

On June 14, 1777, Congress described the American flag in three lines — naming no designer and fixing no arrangement of its stars. The woman remembered for making it left no proof she did; the man who likely designed it was denied his fee.

On June 7, 1776, a Virginian rose in Philadelphia and said out loud what no colony had yet dared put to a vote: that the thirteen colonies were, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. The Declaration everyone remembers was the answer. This was the question.

Ten amendments ratified December 15, 1791 — protecting speech, assembly, due process, and arms. Their application to the states would take another 150 years.

Drafted in Philadelphia over four months in 1787, ratified by nine states in 1788. The oldest written national charter still in force — and the three-fifths compromise was in its original text.

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a document declaring that government draws its just powers from the consent of the governed — most of the fifty-six delegates signed it that August. Many of them held people in bondage.

The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora — governed by a constitution older than the country that borrowed from it.

August 20, 1619: the White Lion landed at Point Comfort with twenty Angolans aboard — the first documented enslaved Africans in English North America.