From "the American Revolution, A History" by Gordon S. Wood:
"...republican ideals and values - about the good life, citizenship, political health, and social morality.... These classical republican values came together with the long-existing European image of Americans as a simple, egalitarian, liberty-loving people to form one of the most coherent and powerful ideologies the Western world had yet seen."
Ain't that the truth? And finally, a concise description of what "republican" (in the non-politicized definition) really means.
"Equality.... and the adoption of republicanism promised a new era of social harmony."
Boy, we could use that now.
"Wealth... was more easily accepted than birth, breeding, family heritage, gentility, or even education, and it was the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.... with the publishing of Ben. Franklin's autobiography in the 1790s, the celebration of the "self-made man" was born."
And isn't that what we still admire as a country today?

From "The Story of American Freedom" by Eric Foner:
regarding the blacks' desire for freedom from slavery:"Yet, if traditional African societies knew the desire not to be a slave, the modern idea of freedom was born in the West.... By invoking the Revolution's ideology of liberty to demand their own rights and defining freedom as a universal entitlement, blacks demonstrated how American they had become..."
I haven't formed my whole opinion regarding this statement, but I essentially agree with it. And wonder about blacks today, some of whom prefer to be more "African" than "American." How far do we go to embrace a culture? Still pondering this one.... and two more books to read parts of.