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The Federalist Papers give a really good overview.

Note that they spent many years analyzing the failure modes of previous republics, and attempting to design a system resistant to those failure modes.

I mean, we're still on our first republic (at least at the moment), while France is on its fifth, so obviously they did something right.



Second. Articles of Confederation were the first.

Third if you count the Civil War and Reconstruction.


I might grant the Articles of Confederation for the sake of argument.

The Civil War failed, so that one doesn't count. The post-Civl War United States continued to operate under the same Constitution. There were some new amendments, certainly, but it wasn't scrapped and rewritten from scratch, and the overall form of the government of the United States remained the same.




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