So I took the test. Or to put it more accurately, I tried to see if I knew what my grandfather had learned, giving myself a pass on Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet and Oregon’s congressional delegation from the ’40s. I’m sure timing had something to do with it — the fact that these pages fell into my life at the end of a hard year, one in which our ability to govern ourselves and to call ourselves united regularly seemed in doubt — but the exercise felt, well, meaningful. Present was the genius of the system of government whose birth we celebrate this weekend but also its gaps and flaws, the manifest truth that the circle of rights has never been fully inclusive. Between the lines was sacrifice — with my grandfather as a proxy for what generations have been willing to undergo to call themselves Americans.