How do we think about the “founding“ of the United States?

The study of the founding of the United States has significance beyond simply understanding what happened and who was involved. We have witnessed throughout our history a tendency to treat the so-called “Founding Fathers” as the most important people who ever lived here, to see them as god-like beings. This is especially true of those who lived between about 1775 and 1790. There is also a tendency to think that all of the great political, social, and religious ideas coalesced during these years and that nothing has been that good or brilliant since then. In a sense, as one historian has put it, “we are held captive by the Founding Fathers.” In other words, what they thought and what they believed have to be the greatest thinking and believing that has ever occurred. This overburdens the founding and prevents us from seeing the compromises and disagreements of the time period and obscures the problems and issues that severely tested the Constitution and the government in the early years of the Republic.