On the evening of July 3, 1776, most Americans had no idea what was coming.

That sentence requires a moment to sit with, because we have been conditioned — by school curricula, by patriotic pageantry, by two and a half centuries of national mythology — to imagine the founding of the United States as a single luminous moment. A room full of men signing a document. Bells ringing. A new nation bursting into existence on a summer morning.

The reality was messier, slower, and far more interesting.