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| What does the American Revolution still have to teach us and how might the ideas, debates, and sacrifices that shaped a nation continue to shape our understanding of liberty? |
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| “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”– Abraham Lincoln |
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| Before there was a nation, there was a debate about liberty. As the nation looks ahead to the 250th anniversary of American independence, this season invites renewed attention to the ideas, debates, and sacrifices that shaped the American experiment and the unresolved questions that continue to define it. This week’s highlights return to enduring arguments about liberty, civic responsibility, and self-government, recalling moments that sharpened public attention on the people, practices, and habits that sustain a free society. |
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| Wilfred M. McClay, A Call to Liberty
The opening essay of A Call to Liberty returns readers to the Declaration of Independence and invites a deeper understanding of its origins and enduring power. Drawing on Thomas Jefferson’s own reflections, the essay presents the Declaration not as an exercise in abstract theory or individual originality, but as an expression of the American mind. |
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| Vincent Geloso, Antoine Noël, Samuel Gregg, Marcus M. Witcher, C. Bradley Thompson, and Anthony Comegna, Online Library of Liberty
Long regarded as a turning point in America’s economic development, the American Revolution is rarely examined through a sustained counterfactual lens. By asking what economic path the United States might have followed had independence failed, this essay draws on comparative evidence from colonial Quebec and long-run data on growth, trade, and market integration to assess how the Revolution altered the country’s economic trajectory.
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| Paul Seaton, Law & Liberty
Beneath its familiar language, the Declaration of Independence advances a distinct understanding of human nature as moral and rational agency. This essay shows how concepts such as equality, unalienable rights, and consent function within that view, revealing a civic anthropology essential to self-government.
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| Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Econlib
Long the subject of debate, the American Revolution is often assessed primarily in terms of its costs, contradictions, and unintended consequences. This essay examines a broader set of domestic and global effects, arguing that the Revolution accelerated institutional, legal, and social changes whose benefits extended beyond the United States and shaped the development of liberty and self-government across the Atlantic world.
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| James R. Rogers, Law & Liberty
Often read as a manifesto of individual rights, the Declaration of Independence also advances a demanding vision of collective consent and representative self-government. By recovering the founders’ understanding of inalienable rights as both limiting and justifying government, this essay shows how law, liberty, and consent were meant to work together rather than stand in opposition.
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| Liberty Fund
Historian Jack P. Greene discusses the Pamphlet Project, explaining how eighteenth-century pamphlets illuminate competing arguments over constitutional authority and public debate in the British Atlantic world and demonstrating the value of close historical inquiry into the foundations of political ideas. |
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