In "Founded on Freedom: Why You Should Be Proud of the Birth of America," Daniel S. Stackhouse, Jr. argues that the preambles to the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution form America's "mission statement" - an explanation for why the nation came into being and how it means to accomplish its purpose. As Stackhouse notes, mission statements are not necessarily a reflection of what is: they are often aspirational, seeking to address some need or attain a goal. Stackhouse argues that although most people throughout world history had not enjoyed the Declaration's proclaimed God-given natural rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the deeply held belief in America's founding principles led the new United States of America, from its very beginning, to break off from the path which most of the rest of the globe had trodden throughout the ages and has continued to inspire and guide Americans ever since. After first putting America's colonial experiences with Indians and slavery into their historical and global contexts, Stackhouse argues that virtually everyone of the founding generation understood America's founding principles to mean precisely what they said, despite the fact that they had not been perfectly fulfilled. Thereafter, great Americans like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan have repeatedly urged us to return to our founding ideals whenever threats to liberty and justice have appeared and required the nation to make a course correction and return to its true north. Stackhouse urges all Americans not to abandon our "mission statement" but to return once again to its unifying principles, now when we need them more than ever.

The bestselling author of "Washington's Crossing" and "Albion's Seed" offers a strikingly original history of America's founding principles. Fischer examines liberty and freedom not as philosophical or political abstractions, but as folkways and popular beliefs deeply embedded in American culture. 400+ illustrations, 250 in full color.

The principles of liberty and freedom are fundamental to our nation. But what do they mean to us, and how have their meanings changed through time? Here, Fischer examines liberty and freedom as folkways that are deeply embedded in American life. He studies American ideas of liberty and freedom through the symbols they have inspired from the Revolutionary era through 9/11. Over 200 color and black and white illustrations.

When members of the founding generation protested against British authority, debated separation, and then ratified the Constitution, they formed the American political character we know today-raucous, intemperate, and often mean-spirited. Revolutionary Dissent brings alive a world of colorful and stormy protests that included effigies, pamphlets, songs, sermons, cartoons, letters and liberty trees. Solomon explores through a series of chronological narratives how Americans of the Revolutionary period employed robust speech against the British and against each other. Uninhibited dissent provided a distinctly American meaning to the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and press at a time when the legal doctrine inherited from England allowed prosecutions of those who criticized government. Solomon discovers the wellspring in our revolutionary past for today's satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, and protests like flag burning and street demonstrations. From the inflammatory engravings of Paul Revere, the political theater of Alexander McDougall, the liberty tree protests of Ebenezer McIntosh and the oratory of Patrick Henry, Solomon shares the stories of the dissenters who created the American idea of the liberty of thought. This is truly a revelatory work on the history of free expression in America.

The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.

The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white. Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom. A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.

This book provides a complete overview of the Founders' natural rights theory and its policy implications.