On this date in 1787 the U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia.

Frye in The Secular Scripture:

America has a genuine social mythology in which beliefs in personal liberty, democracy, and equality before law have a central place.  Every major American writer will be found to have stuck his roots deeply into this serious social mythology, even if he advocates civil disobedience or makes speeches in a country with which America is at war.  Genuine social mythology, whether religious or secular, is also to be transcended, but transcendence here does not mean repudiating or getting rid of it, except in special cases.  It means rather an individual recreation of the mythology, a transforming of it from accepted social values into the axioms of one’s own activity.  (CW 18, 111)