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

Danielle Allen

Jun 2014 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this eBook

“A tour de force.... No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” —Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books

Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize
Winner of the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize
Winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize (Nonfiction)
Finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Hurston Wright Legacy Award
Shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
A 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 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 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 America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy).

About the author

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Cuz and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.