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 real American Revolution. No one is born understanding what it means to be an American.

No one is born understanding the idea of political freedom or knowing about the American Revolution.

We have to learn these things.

If we don't, the American Revolution, political freedom,

and Americans will vanish from the earth.

How do we learn these things?

From the earliest days and for almost two and a half centuries now, when Americans have looked back on the American Revolution.

We have naturally remembered great events. The Boston Tea Party, the convening of the First Continental Congress, Paul Revere's Ride,

the battles of Lexington and Concord, Washington crossing the Delaware, the winter at Valley Forge, the Battle of Yorktown.

This is reasonable and human.

Actions, events, individual sacrifice and valor, reach the mind vividly through the imagination.

All the colourful circumstances, the risky and fateful choices, the acts of daring and heroism, deserve and need serious study.

They teach endless generations by example.

But every example is an example of something. To understand the examples and fully benefit from them,

we must understand what it is they exemplify.

We can't understand the heroic deeds of the American Revolution. We can't see the most essential thing we can learn from them without

understanding what caused them and what it was for the sake of which

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