Yet full persuasion may not even be the right goal, some historians argue. They say the country needs to recover its tradition of debating the core ideals present at the founding. Disagreement is inevitable, even desirable. “Let interests clash and argument prosper,” as the historian Maier put it in her 1997 book, “American Scripture,” even as she stripped back some of the country’s magical thinking about the founding. Maier did not view her work as settling any of the most important questions. The very contest over America’s founding is a sign that the project is working. It’s the absence of disagreement that we should fear the most.

The historian Hattem says there’s a reason that the memory of the Revolution has not united all Americans. “How could it possibly do that?,” he said. “Think of the political circumstances that you would need to create in which all Americans agreed on what the Revolution meant. That would be terrifying. That would be Stalinist circumstances. We are too large and too diverse a nation to ever agree on what the Revolution means. That is a good thing.”

In a way, the modern standard of studying the past — in which legends are waiting to be busted — has become so dominant that Americans have lost practice in the much older tradition of drawing a collective identity from their history.

In a 1960 book of essays called, “Truth and Opinion,” the British historian C.V. Wedgwood warned, “History dispassionately recorded nearly always sounds harsh and cynical.” She added, “telling it without comment is, inevitably, to underline its worst features: the defeat of the weak by the strong, the degeneration of ideals, the corruption of institutions, the triumph of intelligent self-interest.” An account of the past that withholds the possibility of meaning is not only uninterested in the future. It invites the listener to abandon all hope of it.

That’s why history alone cannot tell a society what to do next. Even the promise that it can help humanity avoid repeating its worst mistakes is dubious (look at our wars). What it can spark, though, is moral imagination. When previous generations of Americas faced their own crises, they looked to the origin of the nation for inspiration. They discovered new ideas of freedom, liberty and equality that suited their own times and needs. They reinvented their country.

What they found was not a single story but a single conversation, across time, about a common inheritance. The facts will always matter. But the search for a country’s purpose is a different undertaking, and it is not one upon which anyone can lay absolute claim. Wherever there are people debating the meaning of the founding, what is old has already passed away. A new nation is coming into view.