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Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385542836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
From one of America's foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. "No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing" —(Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books)
Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385542836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Get Book Here
Book Description
From one of America's foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. "No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing" —(Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books)
Author: Danielle Allen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871408139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
“A tour de force.... No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” —Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize Winner of the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize Winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize (Nonfiction) Finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Hurston Wright Legacy Award Shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Selection Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation’s founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy).
Author: Pauline Maier
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307791955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Pauline Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. It is truly "American Scripture," and Maier tells us how it came to be -- from the Declaration's birth in the hard and tortuous struggle by which Americans arrived at Independence to the ways in which, in the nineteenth century, the document itself became sanctified. Maier describes the transformation of the Second Continental Congress into a national government, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, and with more authority than the colonists would ever have conceded to the British Parliament; the great difficulty in making the decision for Independence; the influence of Paine's []Common Sense[], which shifted the terms of debate; and the political maneuvers that allowed Congress to make the momentous decision. In Maier's hands, the Declaration of Independence is brought close to us. She lets us hear the voice of the people as revealed in the other "declarations" of 1776: the local resolutions -- most of which have gone unnoticed over the past two centuries -- that explained, advocated, and justified Independence and undergirded Congress's work. Detective-like, she discloses the origins of key ideas and phrases in the Declaration and unravels the complex story of its drafting and of the group-editing job which angered Thomas Jefferson. Maier also reveals what happened to the Declaration after the signing and celebration: how it was largely forgotten and then revived to buttress political arguments of the nineteenth century; and, most important, how Abraham Lincoln ensured its persistence as a living force in American society. Finally, she shows how by the very act of venerating the Declaration as we do -- by holding it as sacrosanct, akin to holy writ -- we may actually be betraying its purpose and its power.
Author: Steve Pincus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300224443
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
An eye-opening, meticulously researched new perspective on the influences that shaped the Founders as well as the nation's founding document From one election cycle to the next, a defining question continues to divide the country’s political parties: Should the government play a major or a minor role in the lives of American citizens? The Declaration of Independence has long been invoked as a philosophical treatise in favor of limited government. Yet the bulk of the document is a discussion of policy, in which the Founders outlined the failures of the British imperial government. Above all, they declared, the British state since 1760 had done too little to promote the prosperity of its American subjects. Looking beyond the Declaration’s frequently cited opening paragraphs, Steve Pincus reveals how the document is actually a blueprint for a government with extensive powers to promote and protect the people’s welfare. By examining the Declaration in the context of British imperial debates, Pincus offers a nuanced portrait of the Founders’ intentions with profound political implications for today.
Author: Byron Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
The Radical Declaration offers a timely series of thought provoking essays that challenges the nation to look beyond contemporary political orthodoxies in order to recapture the ideals of the nation's founding creed. Rev. Williams is one of the leading public theologians in the nation. He is a columnist, author, and the former pastor of the Resurrection Community Church in Berkeley, CA. His weekly column appears in the popular Huffington Post along with selected publications in North Carolina and California. He is host of the NPR-affiliated broadcast The Public Morality and serves as adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity.
Author: Carl Lotus Becker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Natural law
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Author: R. B. Bernstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199713626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Here is a vividly written and compact overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as the "Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen. In The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings--people much like us--who nevertheless achieved political greatness. They emerge here as men who sought to transcend their intellectual world even as they were bound by its limits, men who strove to lead the new nation even as they had to defer to the great body of the people and learn with them the possibilities and limitations of politics. Bernstein deftly traces the dynamic forces that molded these men and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization's Age of Enlightenment. He analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems--among them independence, federalism, equality, slavery, and the separation of church and state--that both shaped and circumscribed the founders' achievements as the United States sought its place in the world.
Author: Frederick Douglass
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3385512875
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30
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Book Description
Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.
Author: Michael D. Hattem
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300256051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
How American colonists reinterpreted their British and colonial histories to help establish political and cultural independence from Britain In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation.
Author: Edward J. Erler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538122103
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015), one of the profoundest political thinkers of his time, is known most prominently for his pathbreaking work on Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa, who taught for 50 years at the Claremont Colleges and was a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute, sought to produce a revolution in political philosophy by applying Strauss’s controversial thinking about natural right, Scripture, and human greatness to American politics. In these 10 essays, beginning in the 1980s, Jaffa rediscovered the moral and intellectual complexity of statesmanship, in particular that of Lincoln and the American founders. The essays reveal the profundity of the Declaration of Independence, in observations both theoretical (e.g., Aristotle and Aquinas) and practical (e.g., campus radicalism). Jaffa takes aim at the interpretations of America made by some of Leo Strauss’s students, chastising their imputation of radically liberal theorizing to the Declaration and their ignorance of the meaning of “all men are created equal.” The Declaration’s radicalism lies rather in its synthesis of ancient political philosophy and Scriptural authority on the good human life. Jaffa is particularly critical of Allan Bloom and, in previously unpublished essays, Irving Kristol and Harvey Mansfield for their errors about America. Jaffa’s essays recover political philosophy in its political and philosophic dimensions so that it can be a continuing guide for our politics today.
