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

ISBN: 1631490443

Author: Danielle S. Allen

Condition: New

A tour de force.... No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one. -Gordon Wood, New York Review of BooksWinner of the Zcalo Book PrizeWinner of the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman PrizeWinner of the Chicago Tribunes Heartland Prize (Nonfiction)Finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Hurston Wright Legacy AwardShortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for NonfictionShortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Societys Ralph Waldo Emerson AwardA 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 nations 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 Americas cardinal text (David M. Kennedy). 35 illustrations