The American Revolution Life Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness

An informative overview of the American Revolution, this book covers pre-Revolution dissatisfaction, wartime struggles, and the aftermath and its special challenges. This volume helps readers understand the roots, results, and spirit of the American Revolution, but lets them make their own deductions about many lingering issues. Readers will also learn about some of the American Revolution's key players--the Founding Fathers--with a special section on the nation's first president, George Washington, and features on the likes of Abigail Adams, Mary Otis, and Thomas Paine. This resource satisfies the Common Core requirements for history, such as evaluating various explanations for actions or events.

The tale of how the colonial Americans won their independence from Great Britain is well-known among young and old, and its retelling continues to be an inspiration for the struggling and downtrodden. Readers will be introduced to the stressful, tense, and sometimes violent days leading up to the revolution. The instructive text then goes on to discuss major battles, war strategies, and tide-turning events. Both text and sidebars highlight important figures and events in this classic historical tale of perseverance that never grows stale.

This is an account of the life of Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, first Secretary of State, and third president of the United States.

America's Revolutionary Mind is the first major reinterpretation of the American Revolution since the publication of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic. The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before 1776. The Declaration is used here as an ideological road map by which to chart the intellectual and moral terrain traveled by American Revolutionaries as they searched for new moral principles to deal with the changed political circumstances of the 1760s and early 1770s. This volume identifies and analyzes the modes of reasoning, the patterns of thought, and the new moral and political principles that served American Revolutionaries first in their intellectual battle with Great Britain before 1776 and then in their attempt to create new Revolutionary societies after 1776. The book reconstructs what amounts to a near-unified system of thought—what Thomas Jefferson called an “American mind” or what I call “America’s Revolutionary mind.” This American mind was, I argue, united in its fealty to a common philosophy that was expressed in the Declaration and launched with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Excerpts from documents of the time record the patriotism, humor, romance, and determination of the American men and women who supported the Revolution.

"Distinguished scholars shed new light on American history by examining some of the most familiar and revered objects in American art - paintings by John Trumbull, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Winslow Homer; silver by Paul Revere and Tiffany & Co.; furniture by Alexander Roux and Henry Connelly; and photographs by William Henry Jackson and Eadweard Muybridge, among others. The authors discuss how issues of cultural heritage, patriotism, politics, moral outrage, material aspirations, and exploration shaped America's art as well as its ideas, attitudes, and traditions." --Book Jacket.

For most Americans, the Revolution’s main achievement is summed up by the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet far from a straightforward attempt to be free of Old World laws and customs, the American founding was also a bid for inclusion in the community of nations as it existed in 1776. America aspired to diplomatic recognition under international law and the authority to become a colonizing power itself. As Eliga Gould shows in this reappraisal of American history, the Revolution was an international transformation of the first importance. To conform to the public law of Europe’s imperial powers, Americans crafted a union nearly as centralized as the one they had overthrown, endured taxes heavier than any they had faced as British colonists, and remained entangled with European Atlantic empires long after the Revolution ended. No factor weighed more heavily on Americans than the legally plural Atlantic where they hoped to build their empire. Gould follows the region’s transfiguration from a fluid periphery with its own rules and norms to a place where people of all descriptions were expected to abide by the laws of Western Europe—“civilized” laws that precluded neither slavery nor the dispossession of Native Americans.

A spirited reexamination of the most famous words in American history, and the remarkable international context from which they emerged. Thomas Jefferson never actually penned the phrase for which he is best known. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how he originally put it, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion speaks volumes. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a daisy chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down--and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like America. Peter Moore's Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness unmasks the transnational history of this most American of phrases. Before Jefferson, there was the English historian Catharine Macaulay, who wrote in 1768 of the "Virtue, liberty, and happiness of society." Samuel Johnson used the phrase "pursuit of happiness" in his 1759 novella Rasselas (a book whose working title was "The Choice of Life"). Everyone, it seemed, had "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution. Includes 16 pages of black-and-white images