The PROJECT

The idea for American Creed grew out of conversations with two Stanford University professors: Condoleezza Rice, a political scientist and former Secretary of State, and David M. Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian devoted to exploring America’s national character — what defines it and changes over time.

Drs. Rice and Kennedy have been deeply engaged in a series of discussions about a number of urgent questions that are central to our success as a democracy:

  • How is our national character shaped by the ideals espoused in our founding documents?

  • How has the American people’s relationship to those ideals evolved over time?

  • Who are the “we” in “We the People of the United States…”? How has our conception of ourselves evolved?

  • What does being a “citizen” mean? What does productive, imaginative and engaged citizenship look like?

  • How do economic upheavals shape our ideals and/or disconnect us from ideals?

  • What happens to the idea of a shared American creed when social mobility declines along with trust in American institutions?

  • Where are we headed as a nation? How can each of us play a role in determining where we are headed?

These questions embrace several major issues at the forefront of American debate: how to provide access to education and economic opportunity; how to unify our diverse cultural populations; and, most importantly, how to define America’s national identity in a time of grave uncertainty.

A PBS LearningMedia collection of shorts — viewed and discussed by hundreds of thousands of high school students since 2018, and periodically refreshed — along with PBS documentaries (click here to view the original 2018 film) are at the center of a robust national public engagement campaign. Facilitated community conversations, classroom screenings and storytelling labs, including a national Youth Media Challenge inviting teens to compose and share their own media, invite the American public to engage with the idea of a unifying national identity based on shared ideas and ideals.

We hope that the stories in American Creed — which speak to our dilemmas, yet offer hope that shared ideals will prove more powerful than the forces that divide us against ourselves — will engage viewers in a bold conversation about what it will take to uphold the ideal of self-government by and for the people.