Two hundred and fifty years is not an accident — it's an argument, and we're still making it.
In 1776, thirteen colonies made a bet that self-governance could work. The odds were not good. The competition was the British Empire. What they built — imperfect, contested, continually revised — survived every generation that thought the whole project might finally break. At 250, the experiment is still running. That's not a small thing. Most empires don't even get that far.
