A Country’s Story: Who Is Included in “We the People”?
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: How We Tell a Country’s Story
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1100 words, an estimated 3½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
Imagine a camera, zooming in on someone stepping toward a podium.
A crowd of 600 waits. We’re in Rochester, New York. It’s July 5th, 1852.
Seventy-six years have passed since the signing of the Declaration of Independence — nearly a lifetime.
Themes of liberty, equality, and patriotism linger in the air.
Then the speaker begins. His name is Frederick Douglass. And he asks a question that would echo across U.S. history: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”
At the time Douglass gave his speech, nearly a decade before the Civil War, millions of people remained enslaved in the United States — more than one out of eight U.S. Americans.
Rather than rejecting the country’s founding ideals, Douglass confronted the nation with them. A formerly enslaved Black man speaking before a crowd of mostly White abolitionists, Frederick Douglass challenged the U.S. at large to consider whether its actions matched its language and ideals.
The end of his speech was reportedly met with a "universal burst of applause” and requests for copies of the speech spread quickly. His argument about liberty echoed far beyond Rochester. Over the course of his life, he would become a leading voice of his generation.
This month, we’ve been exploring how we tell a country’s story — from “When and where do we begin?” to “how foundational ideas” like democracy take shape across generations.
This week, we turn to another question: When a country says “We the People,” who is included in that story? Who has taken action, across time, to widen or narrow that definition?
The Founding Ideals and Real Contradictions
Many students first encounter history through founding documents, presidents, and battles. These moments matter. But on their own, they can create a narrow frame.
The founding documents of the United States declared powerful ideals: liberty, equality, representation, and government by consent. Yet, those ideals did not equally apply to everyone living within the country’s borders.
At the time of the country’s founding, race-based slavery remained legal. Women were denied the right to vote. Many Indigenous nations were excluded from citizenship and sovereignty. Property requirements limited political participation for multitudes of people. During the first U.S. presidential election, for example, voting was limited mostly to “white, male, property owners,” restricting participation to only a small portion of the population.
These contradictions were not peripheral to the country’s history, they were central, or woven into it from the beginning.
Even some of the Founders recognized the instability and moral contradiction embedded within slavery. Years after helping draft the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson reflected on slavery in a letter written around the time of the Missouri Compromise: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” This image is striking. Jefferson recognized that the country had become entangled in a system fundamentally at odds with its stated ideals — one whose dehumanizing consequences could not be avoided indefinitely.
And this is where voices like Douglass become essential — not as footnotes of chapters, but as central to the overall narrative. When Douglass asks, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” he's asking an essential question: How does a country live up to its own principles? How does it expand its purported idea of “We the People”?
The founding documents asserted what the country stood for. Speeches like Douglass investigated who gets included in those ideals.
Expanding the Frame: Rights are Not Static
The meaning of “We the People” is not fixed.
Across U.S. history, rights have been expanded, restricted, defended, challenged, and redefined through protest, legislation, court decisions, war, organizing, writing, journalism, civic participation, art and social movements.
In many ways, the country’s history can be understood as an ongoing struggle over inclusion, exclusion, power, and rights: Who has access to liberty, legal personhood, citizenship, voting, land, education? Debates over this shape every era of U.S. history.
Expansion was not automatic. Nor was contraction inevitable. Both emerged through human action, conflict, negotiations, advocacy, and resistance.
This is part of what makes teaching U.S. history — and history in general — so important.
A facts-based, comprehensive history does not ignore complexity. In many ways, complexity is the story.
Students can learn that a country may contain both inspiring ideals and profound contradictions at the same time.
And perhaps this matters especially because students encounter these questions while they are still forming their own understanding of identity, community, fairness, participation.
The stories students inherit can shape how they understand themselves, other people, and their role in civic life and the larger world.
History, and the broader work of the humanities, is more than memorizing dates and documents. It also asks students to examine how societies change — and learn about the people who participated in shaping that change.
Call Back to Douglass
Part of what made Douglass’ speech so powerful was that he did not end in despair.
He ended his speech with possibility — with the belief that the country could still move closer toward its stated ideals.
Douglass’ speech was more than a simple critique. It became an act of democratic participation. He used language, argument, and public action to push a country to expand the meaning asserted in its founding documents: Who is included in “We the People? And how might that definition or idea change over time?
In this light, the story of a country continues to be written — shaped by the multitude of people living and participating within it.
Classroom Connection
Place two texts side by side:
Passage from the Declaration of Independence
Passage from Frederick Douglass July 5th Speech
Ask:
What ideals appear in both?
Where do the texts agree? Where do they differ?
How does Douglass use the language of the founding documents in his argument?
What does this reveal about how people shape, challenge, and interpret a country’s ideals over time?
For younger students, simplify the exercise:
What promises does a country (or community) make?
What happens when those promises aren’t applied fairly?
How can people work to improve their country (or community)?
A quick shout out:
Conversations with educators across the United States and beyond helped inspire many of this month’s questions about how we teach complex history in age-appropriate, inquiry-driven, and facts-based ways.
Across countries, many educators are grappling with similar questions: How do we tell a country’s story fully, honestly, and with student-centered care?
Theme: