This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Mostly by sheer coincidence, I had the occasion this spring and summer, before the semiquincentennial celebrations, to visit all the major cities involved in the American Revolution and the founding of our national government. I saw the harbor where Bostonians dressed as Native Americans and ransacked three merchant ships, protesting the monopoly the British gave the East India Company on imported tea to the colonies. I saw the home of Paul Revere, the silversmith who took a midnight ride, alerting his neighbors of the British armed advance into Massachusetts along the Charles River. I saw the little boarding house in Philadelphia where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence—or at least a facsimile of the house, since it was torn down in 1883 to put up a bank and later a lunch counter
I didn’t spend a lot of time in New York, but I was primarily in and around the site of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major confrontation of the Revolution, which prefigured the anomalous pattern of the eventually victorious Continental Army being defeated over and over again. And I saw the site of Federal Hall, where the first presidential inauguration and the presentation of the Bill of Rights were held. A memorial building now marks the spot at 26 Wall Street, right across from the New York Stock Exchange.
In Bensalem, Pennsylvania, the town I grew up in, I saw the mansion where locals say Benjamin Franklin conducted his experiments with electricity; they had taken out the soccer field where I played as a kid. About 15 miles down the road, I saw McConkey’s Ferry, the landing where George Washington led the crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776, to surprise the Hessians at their fortification in Trenton.
American history is essentially about power: those with wealth and privilege climbing over one another to obtain it, and those without such advantages taking them on.
I saw Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell that once hung in its steeple and the nearby archaeological site where George and Martha Washington lived with nine servants in the 1790s, now freighted with controversy after the Trump administration sought to take down explanatory panels about Founding Father slave owners. The panels were still up when I was there, though an appeals court in June gave the National Park Service the green light to remove them. Homemade signs around the location expressed the right to “peacefully protest our government’s attempts to whitewash (literally) history.”
And I saw Washington, modern Washington, where on the day I strolled around the Federal Triangle, an Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon known as The Claw loomed over the South Lawn of the White House, with advertisements on its padded bars from Ram Trucks, Bud Light, and an unregulated online casino called Stake.
Ain’t that America.
MY AMATEUR STUDY OF THE PAST 250 YEARS, reinforced by this accidental journey, has taught me a couple of things about this country. American history is essentially about power: those with wealth and privilege climbing over one another to obtain it, and those without such advantages taking them on. This nation was founded with a healthy skepticism toward concentrated control, and it has been shaped by a continual pendulum swing between entrenchment and fragmentation, consolidation and breaking apart.
Another observation is that real change in America, by and large, has started from outside the system, from common people wanting to improve their lives and the lives of their neighbors, seeking liberty over tyranny, freedom over slavery, equality over bigotry, justice for all and a better life. This was amplified on my trips, too.
I saw campaign signs reading, “Save Our Neighborhood Schools,” local businesses explaining why federal immigration agents were unwelcome on their property, and a solitary man across from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington with a sign reading, “No Arch.” In Portland, Maine, a key stop on the Underground Railroad, I walked the Freedom Trail, discovering how local clergy, longshoremen, porters, barbers, and secondhand clothing dealers ferried freed Black slaves to Canada. And on the way back from that walk, an unidentified man with a bullhorn, like Paul Revere 250 years earlier, warned residents that ICE had been spotted in the area, asking passersby: “What would you do if they confronted you?”
The spirit of America is in these people, the ones who protect their neighbors, the ones who strive for a more perfect union in the workplace, in the halls where legislation is conceived and implemented, in our community spaces. They want control over their own lives, to pursue their happiness as they determine. The version of an America driven unilaterally by Great Men (usually men) making weighty judgments inside gleaming towers does not match our arc of history.
When I visited the JFK Library, his 1961 inaugural address played on a loop, exhorting citizens to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” But it also spotlighted Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage, which featured eight U.S. senators defying their constituents to do what they felt was right. These profiles combine the noble (progressive Nebraskan George Norris leading the revolt against House Speaker Joseph Cannon’s dictatorial control of what bills got voted upon) and maybe not so noble (Edmund Ross voting against the majority of his party to acquit Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial, which at least one historian views as the result of bribes and political patronage). But none of them, to me, represent real American courage.
Courage comes from greater risks than losing a seat in political office. It comes from greater decisions than a representative of the people defying the will of the people. When we thought about how we wanted the Prospect to commemorate this 250th anniversary, we turned to stories about people without institutional power who challenged the most entrenched and dominant forces in our economy and society, risked their lives and reputations, defied conventional wisdom, and triumphed. We’re presenting them to you in this special series with ten profiles of Prospect Patriots who can epitomize the American story in a way that best matches how the nation has adapted and changed—usually slowly and in no way without hardship, but moved inch by inch through the laborious work of citizens who demand better.
THERE’S NO PERFECT WAY TO DO a list like this. If we choose a select sample of patriots, aren’t we reifying the very individualized version of history we wish to reject? And after we choose, won’t we be criticized for who we left out, for whose tales we failed to tell?
Such criticism reflects both the inadequacy of listicles and the reason why magazines sometimes engage in them, on the idea that controversy generates interest. That was not our purpose here, however: We believed that the 250th anniversary would lead to valorization of American heroes in ways that made incorrect evaluations about who in this nation actually has mattered, and still matters. Correcting such misimpressions outweighed the fear of offending by omission.
In our preparations, we laid down some ground rules. First of all, this is not a definitive list of the greatest Americans. We decided against choosing many of those who sit atop such lists traditionally, people like Martin Luther King Jr. or Benjamin Franklin, Rosa Parks or Harriet Tubman. We wanted to go a layer deeper and elevate some less familiar Americans, while also paying tribute to the ideals and priorities of those everyone knows.
The spirit of America is in these people, the ones who protect their neighbors, the ones who strive for a more perfect union in the workplace, in the halls where legislation is conceived and implemented, in our community spaces.
We also made a rule: no elected officials. That means we had no place for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Jeannette Rankin, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Hattie Caraway, and many more who served honorably inside government. We preferred to tell stories from the outside, of those who took the long road of making this nation achieve something close to its stated principles. We only strayed from this in one instance: a state legislator who is better known for his work well before election. There’s also one Supreme Court justice, who again would have been suitable for our esteem even if he were never nominated.
A few of our Prospect Patriots sought political office, and some did take positions of power, or at least counseled people in power. But in so doing, they brought with them the accumulated demands of great masses and movements of Americans. They are in many ways representative of something larger, a profile of one as a synecdoche for millions. And most of them did that work without a formal seat of influence.
We are also aware that nobody in this world is completely perfect, and that even those who best embody the American character made choices that we, 250 or 150 or 50 years later, may find flawed. It would not be possible to construct an honest list free of such blemishes, and we won’t shrink from those faults in telling their stories. We think the broad sweep of their actions exemplifies the America we wanted to uplift.
IN THIS SERIES, YOU WILL READ about the revolutionary with a personal integrity closest to the democratic impulses embedded in the founding documents. You will examine the avatar of the impossible movement to abolish slavery in these United States. You will learn about journalists who chronicled the horrors of racial supremacy and the predations of great combinations of industry. (You’re surprised we foregrounded journalists? We’re a magazine; cut us some slack.)
We chronicle the progressive reformer who fought tirelessly for the liberty of the people. We narrate the tale of the Wall Street law clerk who then exposed Wall Street’s villainy that bankrupted the nation during the Great Depression. We highlight leaders for labor rights and civil rights, in one instance illustrated by the same person. And we nod to the great social movements in America, the demands for dignity and respect at home and abroad, and the desires to solve problems with dialogue and not guns.
Alongside these profiles, you will see entries of other Americans from the same eras whose activities we thought important to honor, with write-ups from people who have studied and admired them. It would be impossible to be comprehensive in recounting 250 years of history on our limited pages; our initial list was roughly twice this size. But we have made our best attempt.
In a moment when so many among us despair about whether we can even keep our fraying democracy, we felt that it was important to write an American story that shows how we’ve emerged from the depths before. Power has been defeated in this nation, at the cost of personal comfort and fortune and lives—sometimes, lots of lives—by those who spoke for the people’s yearnings for freedom. We must remember our history because we are more equipped for future battles when we take history’s lessons. And we must not surrender it to those men of privilege who would twist it into something indecipherable, in the name of putting down rebellions to their authority.
The past—and the present—informs what is possible in America, despite its mistakes, despite its trespasses, despite its cruelties. In a never-ending struggle for the interests of the many over the few, we can choose the side of those who took up the challenge. These are some of their stories.
This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
