Two hundred fifty years ago, an extraordinary generation of Americans swore their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of freedom. Determined to hand down the long-standing tradition of American self-government, our Founders took up arms, triumphed in a hard-fought war against the world’s strongest military power, and left us—their descendants—the greatest system of government the world has ever known. This is our inheritance. America is our birthright.

We can no more pay for such a princely gift than we can pay for the sunrise or the stars, but as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, the way to pay for the priceless is to live lives worthy of the gift. That is what Americans today are called to do—to claim our birthright and keep alive what George Washington called “the sacred fire of liberty.” Despite two and a half centuries of change, the United States is still at its best when its laws and policies—from immigration and national security to education and technology—reflect our founding principles.

This is impossible, however, if America’s future leaders are not familiar with the aspirations that inspired those who fought in the American Revolution and the powerful ideas behind the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Unfortunately, much of this history has been forgotten. Many Americans today have grown up watching their sports heroes kneel during the national anthem and seeing their teachers refuse to say the pledge of allegiance. They have been told that they should be ashamed of our country, founded as it is on racism and sexism.

To reverse these troubling trends, we would do well to learn from John Senior, a great, under-appreciated American, the father of Kansas University’s Integrated Humanities Program, and one of my personal heroes. He believed that true learning ended “in wisdom” but began “in wonder.” Applying this principle to science, for example, he said that it was “criminal to teach astronomy to someone who has never looked at the stars.”

The same is true when it comes to restoring our founding principles today. Trying to teach Americans about those principles without first engendering a sense of wonder about our country and its Founders is foolish. To teach the new generation about the importance of the First Amendment, federalism, or the separation of powers, we must begin by instilling curiosity about the Founding in their minds and a sense of informed patriotism in their hearts.

The best way to accomplish this is by recounting the remarkable stories of our Founders’ lives. That’s where American Founders: Leaders at the Creation of the Republic comes in. More than a practical guide to history, American Founders is a reintroduction to the lives and statesmanship of our greatest leaders. It is my hope that the resources contained within this book—including the Calendar of Notable Events, reproductions of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, primary writings of selected Founding leaders, and of course the essays on the lives and ideas of these Founders—will restore civic literacy and engender appreciation and gratitude in the hearts of all the students, teachers, policymakers, and citizens who turn its pages.

Encountering the Founders’ vision for America, the challenges of the colonial world they lived in, and the sacrifices they endured to change that world compel us to reject the Left’s ahistorical accounts of their lives and legacies. But Americans should remember that it also compels us to let go of the notion—too often found on the Right—that it is impossible to recover America’s founding principles and naive to believe our nation’s best days lie ahead.

This notion begins with nostalgia and ends in cynicism. But the proper response to the courage that crossed the Delaware, the fortitude that outlasted that cold winter at Valley Forge, and the prudence that produced our Founding documents is not nostalgia or cynicism, but piety: a deep sense of gratitude for what we have inherited. The Romans considered piety great among the virtues, and it remains at the heart of any patriotic life. Unlike nostalgia and cynicism, which prompt passivity and stagnation, piety prompts action.

So whether you are working in the classroom to remind a new generation about the moral truths and enduring principles that make America great, working in Congress to channel those truths and principles into good policy, or working in the courts to defend our Constitution’s original meaning, please take this book as an invitation from The Heritage Foundation to learn more about our nation’s Founding, the patriotic piety that it rightly prompts in our hearts, and the civic action it spurs in our lives.

Let us never forget that, as Founding Father Benjamin Rush wrote, “Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice…. Amor Patriae is both a moral and a religious duty. It comprehends not only the love of our neighbors but of millions of our fellow creatures, not only of the present but of future generations.”

Kevin D. Roberts, PhD
President, The Heritage Foundation
June 2025