Educating a first generation of citizens to take their place in a democratic society is as essential today as it was over 200 years ago. Just as teachers in the world's emerging democracies are trying to ready new generations for a democratic life, so were America's first educators concerned with a similar task. Constructing the first modern democracy in history, American educators were pioneers in the business of educating democratic citizens. Rejecting what they considered as the autocratic and irrelevant knowledge of a traditional European education, many looked to more practical skills and knowledge necessary for a citizen's activist democratic role. To accomplish that task, they needed a new curriculum. In this article, the author shows how a curriculum similar to the Expanding Environments curriculum was an important key to citizenship education in America's first schools. The Expanding Environments theory, attributed to the mid-20th century work of Paul Hanna and others, suggests that teachers begin the sequence of social studies--citizenship education--by introducing the more personal and current concepts of self and community in the early grades and by expanding to the less personal and distant concepts of nation and world in the higher grades.