Saturday is the 250th anniversary of an exceptional, world-changing event that's beyond our capability to fully comprehend.

The world in 2026 is so different from 1776 that it's impossible to "put ourselves in the colonists' shoes," or anybody's shoes at all from that time period.

Some might think Thomas Paine was being superlative when he wrote, "The birthday of a new world is at hand." Until you consider the Old World.

To almost all the early settlers in America, civilization meant a social structure headed by a royal aristocracy ruling by divine right.

Historically, the kings, queens and royal courts of Europe were the supreme and arbitrary source of law. European rulers enjoyed absolute power, and it corrupted them absolutely.

Part of that corruption, common to all the major colonial powers, was the institution of slavery.

No one in 1776 could name a European empire that didn't either practice slavery somewhere in its colonies, profit handsomely from slave labor, participate in slave trading, or all of the above.

Slavery was a European concept entrenched over centuries. Portugal began trading enslaved Africans in the 1440s. Spain started in the early 1500s. France's slave colonies developed in the 1600s.

Britain emerged as a slave trader in the 1560s, and by the early 1600s slavery was a fixture in its........

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