Delving back into English history - from the Magna Carta in 1215 to the trial of Charles I in 1649 - Maier reveals the origins of key ideas and phrases. It is truly American scripture and Maier tells us how this came to be - from the Declaration's birth in the hard, tortured struggle for independence from Britain to the ways in which the document itself is sanctified in the nineteenth century. 30,000 first printing.Pauline Maier, one of today's foremost authorities on the American Revolution, shows the 1776 Declaration of Independence as both the defining statement of national identity and the moral standard by which Americans live as a nation. As an argument and an introduction to a crucial artifact of American culture, this book will clearly take its place alongside works by Michael Kammen and Garry Wills. restating the point that leveling accusations at the king was the way Englishmen declared revolution). It's not a terribly long book and could probably have been shorter-there are superfluities and tautologies (e.g. Whereas Jefferson began to see it as his best chance at glory with the Republicans, who exploited it as an anti-British instrument, Lincoln used it to refute Stephen Douglas and, ultimately, slavery. Having set the stage, Maier then proceeds in the last quarter of her book to describe the evolving significance of the Declaration. Maier then looks carefully at the work's original (though now largely ignored) purpose-the airing of grievances against George III, some of which were localized insults generalized to the nation some, so vague as to be pointless some, blinkered versions of complex situations. After a succinct and engaging account of the circumstances of the Second Continental Congress, she examines Jefferson's models, particularly the state and local declarations of independence framed in the spring of 1776. But Maier (The Old Revolutionaries) certainly has.

life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'' etc.).

How is it that a document that was at points derivative, specious, inflated and politically compromised came to take on almost sacred significance in American culture? In fact, few Americans have bothered to examine much beyond a few choice clauses from the preamble (''all men are created equal.

Maier american scripture