Editing Age of Enlightenment (section)

==American Revolution==
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From 1607 to 1776 England (both in terms of the English Crown and English people going to lands claimed by the Crown) had established a series of colonies on the eastern coast of North America which grew in population, wealth and general capacity. While the colonies were initially staunchly loyal to Britain, time and distance conspired to start driving a wedge between parent and child. The aftermath of the Seven Years' War threw the problem into sharp relief for a variety of reasons: new taxes were levied on the colonies that they had no say in to pay for said war; Parliament enacted mercantilist policies in which the colonists were forbidden from trading with anyone other than the British home islands and could not have any industry of their own and signed treaties with natives whose land the colonists wanted for themselves; the British Army was allowed to quarter its soldiers in people's homes; and the passing of laws which allowed Catholics to hold public offices in newly conquered Quebec. Unrest gradually built until it came to a head with the outbreak of war between the colonials and the English government and its loyalists. The colonials threw together a rag-tag government to train and mobilize and support a new army with support from the French and eventually managed to win out against the English forces and achieve independence. After a bit more political shuffling when it became obvious that a loose confederacy would not work the United States of America was born. 

The important thing here was that the new United States was a nation fundamentally built on Enlightenment ideals. Socially speaking, not much changed in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. The Thirteen Colonies had been controlled by an elite group of wealthy, educated men who were subject to the crown but mostly handled local affairs on their own, and afterwards the early US was controlled by the same men alongside some representative government without having to deal with crown officials. However the system of government which was created was one which broke with the longstanding European tradition of hereditary [[monarchy]] backed by the church. The British had already started using some of these ideas in the Home Islands, and said ideas were transplanted to America along with the colonists, especially the Magna Carta. That said, America's Founding Fathers had no truck with kings or lords or the idea that the right to rule was bestowed on people chosen by God, which supposedly made them fundamentally better human beings. Instead, they believed that governments should be accountable to their people, and the Constitution and its appended Bill of Rights would be the ultimate law of the land that no ruler could overturn.

This is not to say that they got everything right the first go. The franchise was still limited to only white men of means and even then there would be some residual property requirements which would not fully fade away until about 1830. The issue of slavery in particular would fester until it came to a head in the American Civil War and was only abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. Even so, the US would be a prototype of democratic government which many people would seek to emulate elsewhere, to various degrees.