Words have histories, and perhaps no word has a longer or more complex history than liberty.  Hegel wrote that history is the history of liberty.  If true, then the history of the United States is one of the most important chapters.  Although this nation’s history has been periodically marred by visceral attempts to assert that one ethnic, religious, or racial group was more American than another, to be an American does in fact mean that one belongs to a community that is unified by an idea: liberty and the pursuit of a fulfilled life (i.e., happiness) are inalienable rights. The United States was the first nation to be founded not upon myth, conquest, or accident, as most others have before, but upon a demand for the protection of those rights.