The collective consciousness field of colonial and United States history, derived era by era. War years are marked — but the contributing events are not only wars: founding documents, revivals, abolition, removal, reform, and reckoning all move the field.
This is derived, not measured. Two lines run across the chart. The promise is the era's dominant worldview or professed ideal; the practice is the more binding of its political and economic order — the reality people actually lived under. The band between them is the gap: the distance between what a civilization professed and what it enacted. The widest gap on this arc is the founding itself: the Revolution and the Constitution professed liberty and equality at 400 while the enacted order — chattel slavery, dispossession — sat near 155, a chasm of +245. The professed ideal ran generations ahead of the practice. The eras of conquest and removal read lower but closer: their brutality was enacted openly, an honest floor rather than a hollow ideal. Where promise and practice converge, the civilization was telling the truth about itself. Every input opens on click — argue with the numbers.