Elected conciliar bodies at all levels were a Medieval innovation. The federal constitution was inspired by colonial charters, antecedent to which were the chartered boroughs of England.

Clearly and especially in the ‘modern’ era, that’s often the case.

However such a treatise is propaganda not history. A historian who fails to strive for objectivity has invalidated his claim to be a historian.

What happened, what did the various parties do and what were the actual results and the consequences of those events… is and ought to be, the whole of it.

No need for colorful assertions, if events are not noteworthy in and of themselves, there’s no purpose in highlighting them.

Example: what makes the Battle of Thermopylae arguably the most historically significant battle in history is not the bravery of the 7300 Greeks who fought against 50,000-250,000 invading Persians. Nor is it even the time it provided for the Athenians to gather their Navy and destroy the Persian supply fleet at Salamis.

Rather it is the potential consequences that rest upon how those events are resolved. For if the Greeks are defeated, democracy itself is stillborn and all of the events that follow are derailed. Most significantly, the American revolution has no historical precedent upon which to base a Republic with democracy as its foundation.

https://www.azquotes.com/author/6246-Warren_G_Harding
“We need citizens who are less concerned about what their government can do for them, and more concerned about what they can do for the nation.”

https://speakola.com/political/john-f-kennedy-inauguration-1961
“I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.”

Or at least some speechwriters do the plagiarizing for them.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/11/john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address-who-wrote-jfks-speech.html

Kennedy believed his inaugural address should “set a tone for the era about to begin,” an era in which he imagined foreign policy and global issues—not least the specter of nuclear annihilation—would be his chief concern. But while Sorensen may have been the only person who could reliably give voice to Kennedy’s ideas, the coming speech was too historic to entrust to merely one man. On Dec. 23, 1960, less than a month before Kennedy would stand on the East Portico of the Capitol to take the oath of office, Sorensen sent a block telegram to 10 men, soliciting “specific themes” and “language to articulate these themes whether it takes one page or ten pages.”

Although Sorensen was without question the chief architect of Kennedy’s inaugural, the final draft contained contributions or borrowings from, among others, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Lincoln, Kennedy rival and two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and, we believe, Kennedy himself.

But an unequivocal puzzling out of exactly who wrote what is, with some exceptions, impossible. Late in his life, Sorensen, who died in 2010, admitted to destroying his own hand-written first draft of the speech at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy, who was deeply protective of her husband’s legacy. When pressed further, Sorensen was famously coy. If asked whether he wrote the speech’s most enduring line, for example, he would answer simply, “Ask not.”
…
If Jacqueline Kennedy and Ted Sorensen were willing to tear up what may have been the only categorical proof of Sorensen’s primary authorship, President Kennedy—in an incident that can only be described as out-and-out deception—was willing to lie. On Jan. 16 and 17, 1961, at the Kennedy vacation compound in Palm Beach, Fla., Sorensen and JFK polished a near-final draft of the inaugural address and even typed it up on carbon paper. Later on the 17th, the two flew back to Washington aboard Kennedy’s private plane, the Caroline, with Time correspondent Hugh Sidey, whose reporting on the president veered between the credulous and the hagiographic.

At some point during the flight, Kennedy began scribbling on a yellow legal pad in front of Sidey, as if working out just then his thoughts about the speech. What Kennedy in fact wrote was some of the precise language that had already been committed to typescript. During an interview with historian Thurston Clarke, author of Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech that Changed America, Sidey recalled thinking, “My God! It’s three days before the inauguration, and he hasn’t progressed beyond a first draft?”

Not only had Kennedy progressed well beyond that, but he and Sorensen had nailed down what we know to be the penultimate version. Even worse, Kennedy later copied out by hand six or seven more pages—directly, one assumes, from the typewritten copy—and dated it “Jan 17, 1961.” After JFK’s assassination, the pages were displayed in what would become his presidential library and identified as an early draft.

There are a total of 51 sentences in the only text of the inaugural that now matters to the world, the speech as read on Jan. 20, 1961, though it can’t be said, without at least some conjecture, that Kennedy was the principal author of any one of them.

Harding can’t get no respect, nor even a footnote.

Anyway, Gladwell had a chapter on Warren Harding, whom Gladwell claims was selected to run for President because he passed the “blink” test (fast cognition) — he looked like a president.
As I recall, Gladwell shed light on Harding I hadn’t encountered before. Harding might have been a dim bulb and had a yum-yum on the side, but he stopped short of the Teapot Dome Scandal. Gladwell reported Harding grabbing Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, (the real perp behind Teapot Dome), shaking him, while crying, “What have you done?”

“Blink” Chapter Three:
pp 72-73: “In that instant, as Daugherty [lawyer and lobbyist] sized up Harding, an idea came to him that would alter American history: Wouldn’t that [fine looking] man make a great President?”
p 75: at the deadlocked 1920 Republican convention, the Party bosses wanted someone they could all agree on, “And one name came immediately to mind: Harding! Didn’t he look just like a presidential candidate?”

No Teapot Dome reference, though, and I haven’t come up with that particular quote on-line. I judge it to be unlikely because of this:

Wikipedia: “Like most of the administration’s scandals, it came to public light after Harding’s death, and he was not aware of the illegal aspects….Hearings into Teapot Dome began in October 1923, two months after Harding’s death.” The “Teapot Dome” article says explicitly that Harding was unaware of Fall’s corruption, and it had no affect on his presidency until the trials began.

Aesop-Check rates this claim Partly True.

Here is an interesting article about Harding, but it concentrates on the scandal, and does not mention his accomplishments (nor did Gladwell, as that was not his purpose).

https://www.thoughtco.com/teapot-dome-scandal-4158547

And this one just proves that two-level justice is not new.
https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/teapot-dome-scandal

Following a lengthy Senate investigation, [Fall] was tried for accepting bribes. He was convicted and sent to federal prison, the first Cabinet-level officer in American history to go to jail for crimes committed while serving in office.

Both Sinclair and Doheny [who obtained the drilling leases from Fall] were exonerated of the main charge—giving bribes to Fall. As a newspaper reporter observed when the two wealthy oilmen were found not guilty, “You can’t convict a million dollars.” Sinclair was sentenced to a 9-month prison term not for bribery but for contempt of Congress, and for charges connected to his hiring of detectives to trail members of the jury in the original bribery trial.

Scanning through the Wikipedia bio, Roland is correct that Harding didn’t retain the credit he deserved, due to the scandals that broke after his death, including Britton’s “tell all” book about their child.

Also from Wikipedia: Murray argued that Harding deserves more credit than historians have given: “He was certainly the equal of a Franklin Pierce, an Andrew Johnson, a Benjamin Harrison, or even a Calvin Coolidge. In concrete accomplishments, his administration was superior to a sizable portion of those in the nation’s history.”

In the beginning of his tenure, “he was given a hero’s welcome when Congress opened in early December as the first sitting senator to be elected to the White House”

His worst legacy is probably setting this precedent.

You can thank FDR for taking the first steps in creating a massive, unresponsive, unaccountable federal govt. His policies were lauded by no other than Il Duce himself, Benito Mussolini, as well as by Hitler and, of course, his Nazi press.