Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Cramoni. inspiring and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Kramon Institute.

I call this one the course of human events.

People and governments are often uncertain what to do and what to think.

And they frequently change their minds, sometimes for no apparent good reason.

America began on July 4th, 1776.

When in the course of human events,

it became necessary for one people to do something. But up to almost the last minute, even after a long train of abuses,

it was very uncertain what exactly it was necessary for that one people to do.

Just three days before that July 4th declaration, as Thomas Jefferson later

remembered, delegates to the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia, argued

for an exhausting nine hours, during which in Jefferson's words, all the powers of the soul had been distended with the magnitude of the question they were

debating. And there was such division that they postponed to vote on independence until the

next day. It is commonly said that in the

American Revolutionary War that followed, about a third of Americans were for

it, a third against it, and a third undecided.

So it always is and will be to one degree or another.

On another July 4th, in 1941, in the crypt of bomb damaged St Paul's Cathedral in London,

a memorial service was attended by hundreds of Englishmen and Americans.

...