Here are 100 books that The Declaration of Independence fans have personally recommended if you like
The Declaration of Independence.
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I was too young for the actual Bicentennial, but it still was the reason why I'm a historian of the American Revolution. With all the excitement about early American history in the years after 1976, at age 5, it was my job to convince my mother to take me to Lexington Green as often as I could. The problems of why a people who were the most socially mobile, comfortable, with the greatest access to representative government would start a revolution have fascinated me since then. Tyrants and Rogues is my fourth book that focuses on the 1770s, and especially the consequences of how the contingencies and choices made in 1776 shape our lives today.
This book is the essential next stop for a reading study on the Declaration.
Her 1997 study is like a 5-course meal, treating you to a sumptuous tour through the English precedents that were very much on the delegates' minds in 1776, how Jefferson wrote the text, how Congress edited it, and how it turned into a sacred relic in the years after 1776.
My underlining and margin writing are all over this book. I learned so much from it. Wonderfully written, too.
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…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I was too young for the actual Bicentennial, but it still was the reason why I'm a historian of the American Revolution. With all the excitement about early American history in the years after 1976, at age 5, it was my job to convince my mother to take me to Lexington Green as often as I could. The problems of why a people who were the most socially mobile, comfortable, with the greatest access to representative government would start a revolution have fascinated me since then. Tyrants and Rogues is my fourth book that focuses on the 1770s, and especially the consequences of how the contingencies and choices made in 1776 shape our lives today.
What was going on in Philadelphia during what would be the last nine weeks of colonial America? William Hogeland tells us: a lot!
Declaration is a careful walk through the plotting and strategizing of Sam Adams, Tom Paine, Thomas McKean, and others inside and outside Congress trying to get Pennsylvania to overturn an election (sound familiar?) and get them (and other colonies) to support independence.
We’re pretty far from Enlightenment principles here, with “Founding Fathers” scheming to achieve American independence.
This is the rambunctious story of how America came to declare independence in Philadelphia in 1776. As late as that May, the Continental Congress had no plans to break away from England. Troops under General George Washington had been fighting the British for nearly a year—yet in Philadelphia a mighty bloc known as "reconciliationists," led by the influential Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, strove to keep America part of the British Empire.
But a cadre of activists—led by the mysterious Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and assisted by his nervous cousin John—plotted to bring about American independence. Their audacious secret plan proposed overturning…
I was too young for the actual Bicentennial, but it still was the reason why I'm a historian of the American Revolution. With all the excitement about early American history in the years after 1976, at age 5, it was my job to convince my mother to take me to Lexington Green as often as I could. The problems of why a people who were the most socially mobile, comfortable, with the greatest access to representative government would start a revolution have fascinated me since then. Tyrants and Rogues is my fourth book that focuses on the 1770s, and especially the consequences of how the contingencies and choices made in 1776 shape our lives today.
Sarson’s book is sort of a return to Becker’s analysis of the ideas in the Declaration.
I learned a ton from this book’s analysis of how Jefferson and Congress thought about history and time when they composed the Declaration.
What does “the course of human events” mean? How did Americans think they were making history? Reacting to it? What kind of history consciousness did they have in 1776? These are very interesting questions that Sarson treats very smartly.
How reading the Declaration of Independence as a document of history explains its intended meaning
Thomas Jefferson chose his words carefully. Few could have been more deliberate than 'When in the Course of human events,' the phrase with which he opened the Declaration of Independence. As Steven Sarson shows, the original Declaration moved through the ages of human history from Creation to American independence, assessing it according to 'the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.'
The Declaration's history and historical consciousness therefore help answer one of American history's great questions: How did the founders reconcile their lofty views on…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I was too young for the actual Bicentennial, but it still was the reason why I'm a historian of the American Revolution. With all the excitement about early American history in the years after 1976, at age 5, it was my job to convince my mother to take me to Lexington Green as often as I could. The problems of why a people who were the most socially mobile, comfortable, with the greatest access to representative government would start a revolution have fascinated me since then. Tyrants and Rogues is my fourth book that focuses on the 1770s, and especially the consequences of how the contingencies and choices made in 1776 shape our lives today.
So what happened to the Declaration after July 4, 1776? Sneff’s new book is a lively exploration of the six months after July, as the Declaration made its way to New York, Boston, the American backcountry, London, and e-v-e-n-t-u-a-l-l-y to Paris.
Sneff shows us how people changed the text and engaged with the decision this news forced upon them. We often forget how the Declaration was a war document, but what I found fascinating in this book – which I inhaled in a few hours – was how the war matters a great deal in shaping how people received the news.
Tracing the moments after its creation, this groundbreaking book follows how news of the Declaration of Independence spread to people throughout the thirteen United States and the Atlantic world.
In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats,…
I’m a political theorist at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. I spent the first fifteen years or so of my career working on the Scottish and French Enlightenments (Adam Smith, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire), but in recent years I’ve been drawn more and more to the American founding. In addition to Fears of a Setting Sun, I’m also the author of The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter, which explores the constitutional vision of the immensely colorful individual who—unbeknownst to most Americans—wrote the US Constitution.
This book is not as acclaimed as the others on this list, but it is a hidden gem. Staloff deftly weaves together the lives and ideas of three of the most notable founders, and the ways in which they were influenced by their Enlightenment forebears. Precisely because the book is relatively little-known, I recommend it all the time to colleagues and students.
In this incisively drawn book, Darren Staloff forcefully reminds us that America owes its guiding political traditions to three Founding Fathers whose lives embodied the collision of Europe's grand Enlightenment project with the birth of the nation.
Alexander Hamilton, the worldly New Yorker; John Adams, the curmudgeonly Yankee; Thomas Jefferson, the visionary Virginia squire—each governed their public lives by Enlightenment principles, and for each their relationship to the politics of Enlightenment was transformed by the struggle for American independence. Repeated humiliation on America's battlefields banished Hamilton's youthful idealism, leaving him a…
Ever since my graduate student days in philosophy and economics, I have slowly come to understand more and more the case for workplace democracy based on normative principles (i.e., the inalienability, property, and democratic principles), not just the obvious consequentialist or pragmatic arguments based on increased productivity (people working jointly for themselves), less worker alienation, and eliminating the divide down the middle of most enterprises between employers and employees. In addition to two decades of teaching university economics, I have co-founded several consulting companies dedicated to implementing these principles in practice, the Industrial Cooperative Association in Massachusetts (now the ICA Group) and the Institute for Economic Democracy in Slovenia, where I have retired.
The third leg of the stool supporting workplace democracy (in addition to the democratic and property arguments) is the inalienable rights argument based on the factual inalienability of people’s responsible agency, which the legal employment contract pretends to be alienated in the firm based on employment. The truth comes out when an employee commits a crime at the behest of the employer; then they suddenly become partners in crime. Since the responsible agency is factually inalienable in both criminous and non-criminous actions, the contract that legally alienates all agency to the employer in the non-criminous case should be abolished. Garry Wills traces the history of the inalienable rights clause in the Declaration of Independence back to its roots in the Scottish and European Enlightenment.
From acclaimed historian Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg, a celebrated re-appraisal of the meaning and the source of inspiration of The Declaration of Independence, based on a reading of Jefferson's original draft document.
Inventing America upended decades of thinking about The Declaration of Independence when it was first published in 1978 and remains one of the most influential and important works of scholarship about this founding document. Wills challenged the idea that Jefferson took all his ideas from John Locke. Instead, by focussing on Jefferson's original drafts, he showed Jefferson's debt to Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Lord…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
Joseph D’Agnese grew up in the Bicentennial-fueled excitement of the 1970s, and spent 1976 fake-playing a fife and sporting a tricorn hat in various school events. Besides teaching him how to get in and out of Revolutionary-period knickers, this experience awakened in him a love for the Founding Era of American history. He has since authored three history titles with his wife, The New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow Allen dissects the Declaration word by word to help us understand its importance.
Her central thesis: we cannot have an American republic devoted to liberty without equality. And if that is so, then isn’t our job to somehow live up to the promise of the Declaration? In some ways, this is a very personal book. In unfussy prose, she tells us how she teaches the Declaration to her students and how they are often transformed by these 1,337 words that they would never have bothered to read if they didn’t take her class.
I would argue most Americans have never read them either (nor the U.S. Constitution, for that matter), but I think after hearing Allen’s arguments, you will be moved to do so.
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…
Joseph D’Agnese grew up in the Bicentennial-fueled excitement of the 1970s, and spent 1976 fake-playing a fife and sporting a tricorn hat in various school events. Besides teaching him how to get in and out of Revolutionary-period knickers, this experience awakened in him a love for the Founding Era of American history. He has since authored three history titles with his wife, The New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
When I was kid, it was a rite of passage to watch the movie version of this musical with my parents on TV during Fourth of July week in the U.S.. I’ve since seen regional theater productions as well.
Yes, the play is fun and funny, but what did not sink in until I’d done my own research into the lives of the signers was how marvelously the words and lyrics lay out the history. When one of the flashy South Carolina delegates sings “Molasses to Rum,” you understand the underlying economics of the slave trade. The songs still hold up and advance the plot, as all great Broadway songs must do.
But if you miss the words in the 1972 film or modern staged versions, the only way to absorb it all is to dip into the official libretto itself.
Winner of five 1969 Tony Awards, including Best Book and Best Musical, this oft-produced musical play is an imaginative re-creation of the events from May 8 to July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, when the second Continental Congress argued about, voted on, and signed the Declaration of Independence.
I have been a colonial-era history buff since I was growing up. Exploring the neighboring forests with my bow and arrow fueled my imagination as a child. I would often visit the North Carolina mountains (which later became my home) with my family, and I learned about the Trail of Tears and Cherokee history. My parents gifted me my first boat in 1973 at age 12, and I have been paddling ever since, with over 400 bodies of water documented in my personal database. We raised our children in canoes, and there is nothing I enjoy more than being out on the water in a wilderness setting and time-traveling back into the spirit of yesteryear.
In a previous life, I taught a class in constitutional law to undergraduates at a local university, many of whom had never heard of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence from May 20, 1775.
That date appears on both the North Carolina state flag and state seal, and commemorates the first political break with England by any governmental body among the original colonies. I enjoyed how the author did his homework and documented sources and conflicting arguments with respect to how this document has been and should be viewed.
This is a comprehensive history of one of the greatest mysteries in American history--did Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, declare independence from Great Britain more than a year before anyone else? According to local legend, on May 20, 1775, in a log court house in the remote backcountry two dozen local militia leaders met to discuss the deteriorating state of affairs in the American colonies. As they met, a horseman arrived bringing news of the battles of Lexington and Concord. Enraged, they unanimously declared Mecklenburg County "free and independent" from Great Britain. It was known as the "Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence"…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
Joseph D’Agnese grew up in the Bicentennial-fueled excitement of the 1970s, and spent 1976 fake-playing a fife and sporting a tricorn hat in various school events. Besides teaching him how to get in and out of Revolutionary-period knickers, this experience awakened in him a love for the Founding Era of American history. He has since authored three history titles with his wife, The New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
This is a great book for kids! With charming illustrations by Michael McCurdy, The Signers tells the personal story of every signer in a way that makes the story behind the Fourth of July engaging for young readers.
Fradin also knows just how to explain complicated issues such as slavery, or matters surrounding 18th-century life that would be lost on most adults, let alone kids. Now yes, the book is intended for readers in grades 4 through 7, but I think it is a fine jumping-off point for teachers and homeschoolers looking for short biographical readings that shed light what life was like for these men and their families during a pivotal time in American history.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
For more than 225 years these words have inspired men and women in countries the world over to risk everything in pursuit of these lofty ideals. When they first appeared in our nation's birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, they were a call to action for a colony on the brink of rebellion. The 56 men who dared to sign their names to this revolutionary…
