American history · Heritage · Education

The record of the founding is public. Reading it should be too.

Affirm1776 exists to help people encounter American history as it was actually recorded: in documents, in places, and in the work of the institutions that preserve them. As a historical-society organization, our purpose is educational rather than political — to make the founding era, and the long American story that follows from it, understandable to students, families, researchers, and neighbours who were never given a way in.

Explore the founding era About the foundation

Status: 501(c)(3)
Exempt since: September 2007
Years registered: 18
Based in: Hartwell, Georgia

Original illustration

Drawn for this site. No archival scans are reproduced here without rights.

American Foundation For Furtheringideas That Rekindle The Miracle Of Affirm1776 — a Georgia 501(c)(3) public charity. EIN 20-8611120. Verifiable through IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search.

Our mission

History, read from the record

Keeping America's founding era legible — through careful history, cultural heritage, and public education.

The American founding is one of the most heavily documented moments in modern history, and one of the least read. Its record survives in ratification debates, ledgers, letters, petitions, maps, and county minutes — most of it public, much of it digitised, and very little of it familiar outside a seminar room.

Affirm1776 works in the space between that record and the people it belongs to. Our focus is historical understanding: what the sources say, how to read them, where they are kept, and why careful interpretation matters more than confident summary.

That work is deliberately non-partisan. History used as an argument stops being history. We are interested in the harder and more durable thing — giving people the means to reach the evidence themselves.

Affirm1776 is the public identity of American Foundation For Furtheringideas That Rekindle The Miracle Of Affirm1776, classified under Arts, Culture and Humanities — Historical Societies & Related Historical Activities.

Read our story

What we work on

Six strands of the same work

Preservation, education, and research are not separate activities. Each one is what makes the next possible.

Historical preservation

Supporting the case for keeping the physical and documentary record intact — the papers, structures, and local archives through which the past remains checkable rather than remembered.

Public education

Explaining the founding era in plain language for people outside academic settings: students, families, teachers, and adult learners returning to a subject they last met in school.

Primary sources

Pointing readers toward the documents themselves, held by national and state institutions, so that historical claims can be traced back to something written at the time.

Research and interpretation

Encouraging the slower habits of historical work — corroboration, context, and an honest account of what a source can and cannot tell us.

Arts, culture and humanities

Treating history as a humanities discipline, connected to the material culture, craft, and civic art through which each generation has represented its own moment.

Community heritage

Recognising that national history is assembled from local history — the county records, cemeteries, churches, and family papers of places like Hart County, Georgia.

Organizational standing

What can be verified about us

Every figure below is drawn from the public record and states its source. Where we do not yet publish a number, we say so rather than estimate one.

Years of registered operation

Calculated from federal tax exemption granted in September 2007.

501(c)(3)

Public charity status

Recognised by the Internal Revenue Service.

20-8611120

Employer Identification Number

Verifiable via IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search.

Hartwell, Georgia

Registered location

Hart County, in northeast Georgia.

We do not publish programme counts, attendance figures, or financial statistics on this site. When those figures are compiled and confirmed, they will appear here with the same source lines.

Founding-era chronology

Twenty-six years that had to be argued out

A short reference chronology of the founding period, drawn from the documentary record held by the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

A note on this chronology

These are general historical facts, offered as reference. They describe the period the foundation studies — not events in which the foundation took part.

The full chronology and study guide

1765
The Stamp Act and the question of consent
Parliament imposed the first direct tax on the American colonies. The protests that followed were argued less about the sum owed than about who held the authority to levy it. The Act was repealed in 1766, but the constitutional question it raised was not settled.
July 1776
Independence declared
The Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, voted in favour of independence on 2 July and adopted the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. The engrossed copy now held by the National Archives was signed principally on 2 August.
1777 – 1781
The Articles of Confederation
Congress adopted the Articles in November 1777 as the first written frame of government for the united states. Ratification by all thirteen states was completed in March 1781. The Articles held the union together through the war and revealed, in doing so, the limits of a government without independent revenue.
September 1787
The Constitution signed
Delegates to the Philadelphia Convention signed the Constitution on 17 September 1787. What followed was a year of public argument — the Federalist and Anti-Federalist essays among the most closely read political writing ever produced in America.

Explore the topic

How to read a historical source

The single most useful thing a person can be given is not a fact but a method. These four steps are the ordinary working practice of historical research.

Step one

Establish what the document is

Before reading for meaning, read for form. Is it a letter, a petition, a legal instrument, a printed broadside, a later copy? A transcription made in 1830 of a 1776 letter is evidence of two moments, not one.

Form determines what a source can be asked to prove.

Step two

Ask who was speaking, and to whom

Founding-era writing is almost always addressed to a particular audience — a legislature, a subscriber list, a rival, a spouse. Purpose shapes emphasis. A pamphlet written to persuade is not less useful than a private letter, but it is useful in a different way.

Audience is context, not a reason for suspicion.

Step three

Corroborate before concluding

A single source establishes that something was said. Two independent sources begin to establish that it happened. Where the record is thin, the honest finding is often that the evidence does not settle the question.

The strongest historical claim is the one that survives checking.

Step four

Separate chronology from causation

That one event followed another is a matter of record. That it was caused by it is an argument, and must be made as one. Much popular history quietly converts the first into the second.

Sequence is evidence; explanation is interpretation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Declaration of IndependenceAdopted in Congress, 4 July 1776. Engrossed copy held by the U.S. National Archives; text in the public domain.

Where to look

Reference collections, open to everyone

These collections are maintained by the institutions that hold them. Each link goes directly to the source — nothing is republished here.

See all reference collections

Get involved

History is kept by the people who bother

Whether you can give, volunteer, teach, or simply pass this on — there is a way in, and it starts with a conversation.

Ways to take part Contact the foundation