Description
This volume assembles four essays on the American Declaration of Independence and combines them with a large number of color illustrations. The four essays discuss the role of congressional figures other than Jefferson in fashioning the document, analyze the enumeration of grievances that the Declaration laid out in support of independence, describe the popularization of Jefferson as author of the Declaration in the 1790s as an effort by Jeffersonian Republicans to counter the Federalists' cult of Washington, and analyze the international diplomatic context and purpose of the Declaration. Also included are biographical sketches and color portraits of all of the Declaration's signers. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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This volume asks us to reread and rethink our founding document. The Declaration of Independence as we now understand it - the stirring passages that define our democratic creed - is not the Declaration that Thomas Jefferson and his congressional colleagues drafted, nor the document that inspired or provoked contemporaneous readers and listeners at home and abroad.Essays by four of the Declaration's leading students make the historic text come alive, enabling us to hear what it had to say in its own time and what it might have to say to us today. Copiously illustrated with selections from the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection at the University of Virginia and complemented by biographical sketches of the Declaration signers, this volume offers a rich resource for discovering the origin and influence of America's founding document.
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