What does this mean for this omni-American cultural literacy project? For one thing, the list for these times can’t be the work of one person or even one small team. It has to be everyone’s work. It has to be an online, crowd-sourced, organic document that never stops changing, whose entries are added or pruned, elevated or demoted, according to the wisdom of the network.

Everyone should make his or her own list online. We can aggregate all the lists. And from that vast welter of preferences will emerge, without any single person calling it so, a prioritized list of “what every American needs to know.”

It also means that every entry on this dynamic list can be a node to another list. So an entry on “robber barons” (present in the 1987 list) should open up to “malefactors of great wealth” (TR’s line, not on the 1987 list) and “economic royalists” (FDR’s, not there either) and “the 1 percent.” There should be an entry on “Southern heritage” that links sideways to other euphemisms for white supremacy. Or an entry on “women’s suffrage” that links to other suffrage movements.

This will be a list of nodes and nested networks. It will be a fractal of associations, which reflects far more than a linear list how our brains work and how we learn and create. Hirsch himself nodded to this reality in Cultural Literacy when he described the process he and his colleagues used for collecting items for their list, though he raised it by way of pointing out the danger of infinite regress. “Where should such associations stop?” he asked. “How many are generally known by literate people?”

His conclusion, appropriate to his times, was that you had to draw boundaries somewhere with the help of experts. My take, appropriate to our times, is that Americans can draw not boundaries so much as circles and linkages, concept sets and pathways among them.

Because 5,000 or even 500 items is too daunting a place to start, I ask here only for your top ten. What are ten things every American—newcomer or native born, affluent or indigent—should know? What ten things do you feel are both required knowledge and illuminating gateways to those unenlightened about American life? Here are my entries:

Whiteness The Federalist Papers The Almighty Dollar Organized labor Reconstruction Nativism The American Dream The Reagan Revolution DARPA A sucker born every minute

I chose some off-center items—Reconstruction instead of the Civil War, for instance, or the Federalist Papers instead of the Constitution—because the off-center concepts imply and necessitate command of the central ones. Others, like nativism, are both a specific historical reference and recurring motif in American politics. And “a sucker born every minute” is of course both a particular saying and a general emblem of a society that revolves around mass entertainment. What are your ten, and why? (And if you like, what are your next ten, and the next?) Share your lists with us online. Argue them out with friends and family and fellow citizens. The culture wars can give way to a conversation about the culture we are. And together, over time, Americans will author a definitive, unendingly edited guide to how to read, write, speak—and be—American.

This post appears courtesy of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.