That’s the spirit that I hope the soon-to-open Museum of the American Revolution in Old City, Philadelphia gives its visitors. I hope the place feels like its recreated little bits and pieces of Colonial America. I hope that it provides the context for visitors to understand one of the things that made the American Revolution so extraordinary: that it was a revolution to conserve inherited rights and liberties, and so to preserve a cherished way of life rather than an attempt to create some utopia from abstract principles.

The Museum opens in late April, though I don’t expect to visit until sometime this summer. Whether it fulfills all my own hopes or not, it will be good to have this Museum takes place among so many others in this city, and intentionally try to tell a story of the country’s founding capital that has just been so much a part of our history that it took us more than two centuries to think of creating a museum for it.