Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

by Danielle Allen
Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

by Danielle Allen

eBook

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Overview

“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).

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780871408136
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date: 06/16/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 229,609
File size: 6 MB

About the Author

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Cuz and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Chronology 15

Prologue 21

Part I Origins

The Declaration of Independence 27

1 Night Teaching 31

2 Patrimony 36

3 Loving Democracy 39

4 Animating the Declaration 42

Part II Who Wrote the Declaration of Independence?

5 The Writer 47

6 The Politicos 52

7 The Committee 65

8 The Editors 72

9 The People 79

Part III The Art of Democratic Writing

10 On Memos 85

11 On Moral Sense 89

12 On Doing Things With Words 92

13 On Words and Power 100

Part IV Reading the Course of Events

14 When in the Course of Human Events… 107

15 Just Another Word for River 110

16 One People 115

17 We Are Your Equals 119

18 An Echo 123

Part V Facing Necessity

19 …It Becomes Necessary… 129

20 The Laws of Nature 130

21 And Nature's God 135

22 Kinds of Necessity 139

Part IV Matters if Principle

23 We Hold These Truths… 145

24 Sound Bites 146

25 Sticks and Stones 151

26 Self-Interest? 156

27 Self-Evidence 160

28 Magic Tricks 167

29 The Creator 171

30 Creation 178

31 Beautiful Optimism 183

Part VI Matters of Principle

32 Prudence … 191

33 Dreary Pessimism 193

34 Life's Turning Points 197

35 Tyranny 202

36 Facts? 207

37 Life Histories 213

38 Plagues 218

39 Portrait of a Tyrant 222

40 The Thirteenth Way of Looking at a Tyrant 224

41 The Use and Abuse of History 227

42 Dashboards 230

43 On Potlucks 233

44 If Actions Speak Louder Than Words… 240

45 Responsiveness 246

Part VIII Drawing Conclusions

46 We Must, Therefore, Acquiesce… 257

47 Friends, Enemies, and Blood Relations 259

48 On Oath 263

49 Real Equality 267

50 What's in a Name? 270

Epilogue 275

Notes 283

Resources 297

Acknowledgments 301

Illustration Credits 303

Index 305

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