The Atlantic was founded in 1857, during a period of grave crisis. Within a few years, the United States was engulfed in the Civil War—our greatest national trauma. The Civil War would be followed by an attempt at Reconstruction, abandoned after scarcely a decade in a deal between both political parties. The murder of Reconstruction consigned African Americans to a regime of injustice and violence that would have legal sanction for a century.

But several things happened in the brief window between the end of the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction that have, in the years that followed, either kept us from falling or borne us aloft.

One was the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Not only was slavery abolished but the provisions of the Bill of Rights were extended to cover the actions of state governments. The so-called Reconstruction Amendments redefined the nature of citizenship and represented a “second founding.” Americans have invoked these amendments—successfully—time and again.

That same brief window gave us a speech by Frederick Douglass entitled “Our Composite Nationality,” a work of literature and rhetoric that sought to define America’s highest aspirations. Douglass’s vision of the kind of society America might become entails a duty that Americans cannot shirk.

As writers note in the essays that follow, America has reinvented itself before—and has needed to. History offers no blueprint. It provides neither exact parallels nor off-the-shelf policy options. But it can remind us of the tools still at our disposal—values, outlooks, attitudes, instincts. It reminds us as well that aspiration itself can be a tool.