“There are no great men,” the famed U.S. Admiral “Bull” Halsey declared, “There are only great challenges which ordinary men are forced to meet.” Halsey, a gruff commander famed for his exploits in World War II, was no woke academic. But the idea that great men, or great women, don’t exist is very much a late 20th-century invention.

George Washington is the best illustration of how wrong that idea is. The American Revolution, the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has said, “turned the world upside down.” Burns, noting that it created the concept of a “citizen,”  called it “the most important event since the birth of Christ.”