Outline the evolution of modern American democracy over the last 500 years.

What will be an ideal response?

American democracy has roots that stretch all the way back to the poleis, the Greek city-states who first developed democracy as a concept and political structure. In the last 500 years, it has evolved out of protests against established authority, such as the Protestant Reformation; natural law theory, developed by Isaac Newton and others; and the ideas of modern philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke. Beginning in colonies like New England, early colonists formed political structures based on direct democracy. Both direct and indirect democracies at the colonial level heavily influenced the formation of the United States' representative democracy.