And who are included within that seemingly generous phrase, "we, the people"? Who are the "we"? Like democracy, the definitions of "we, the people" have been contested. For instance, some African Americans might have been free but most were enslaved from the nation's founding. They became citizens, although not endowed with all of the rights of citizenship, only after the adoption of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments in 1865 and 1868. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship by naturalization to "free white persons," and thereby barred Asian American immigrants from citizenship, for the most part, until 1952. And white women might have been citizens but only gained the right to vote in 1920.

Students and Americans generally might believe that democracy's institutions are the creations of Europeans. Although made in America especially along the frontier where, allegedly, the Old World distinctions of station and birth broke down, democracy derived from European antecedents from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment and rise of the modern nation-state. Non-Europeans, within that idea of democracy's source, enjoy, depend upon, and must learn from European civilization, which constitutes America's unifying core and common ground.

While it is true that American institutions draw copiously from European wellsprings, it is equally true that American democracy was created in the U.S. by Europeans and non-Europeans alike. This curriculum stresses the roles of historically excluded groups in that act of creation as a corrective to the prevailing misconceptions of democracy's natures and meanings. Further, the efforts of those who have been denied power and privilege for inclusion within the American promise, the American creed, the American dream point to the contradictions within American democracy that afford, at once, both opportunities and constraints.

Although the guarantees of life, liberty, and property are foundational to American democracy, they were routinely denied to certain groups at various times in the nation's history. And yet, the principle of equality under the law allowed for demands of redress against inequality, and those claims, whether won or lost, deepened and enriched the meaning of the American identity - the idea of who is an American - and ultimately ensured the rights, privileges, and obligations that comprise the very heart of American democracy.

In those ways, excluded groups have placed themselves within the compass of "we, the people," a circle that had formerly been denied them, and helped to reshape democracy's contour and extend its reach for the benefit of all Americans.