Tentative Answer: American Revolution

Tonight I went back to review the American revolution (if that's what you call it?), because I was a bit confused about the order the US Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution came in. Since I'm from Canada, we learned about our own Constitution and the way things work in our government, but we didn't really learn about US history or government. The US Declaration of Independence came first and shows why the King was bad because he taxed people and didn't understand their issues. When I first read it I was confused about who the "he" figure was. This kind of reminded me of how Machiavelli said that if you want to rule a place you should live there or understand the place well so that you can be a good ruler. Then came the Constitution, and then the Bill of Rights, which are amendments to the constitution which help to protect minority rights from the majority. I think it's interesting that the Bill of Rights happened while slavery was still happening. I also found checks and balances interesting - from my understanding, the US government is divided into legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and none of them would have too much power because they check and balance each other when creating laws. This reminded me of Social Studies class in Canada; our teacher had us "act out" the government system passing a law. The proposal had to be read out loud two or three times so that the people who were voting would listen through the whole thing and check for any problems. Then it would go through the Senate, which our teacher continuously reminded us was necessary since it was a "sober second thought." I think at the end our paper was signed and posted on the bulletin board in the classroom. Even though I don't know that much about US history and may sometimes get confused with some terminology, I'm happy to learn more about how things work in this country.