Amazon Digital Services LLC - KDP Print US

What Is The American Dream Amazon Digital Services LLC - KDP Print US

When Thomas Jefferson wrote America's Declaration of Independence in June 1776 - with some help from his fellow patriots John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston - he got it perfectly right with the first sentence of the second paragraph: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." John Quincy Adams wrote, "Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."Thus, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, rising citizens were presented with small handbooks-brief guides to the essential elements of the American creed. Pastors, statesmen, educators, and parents wanted to somehow pass on to posterity the moral and constitutional tools necessary to make good use of their freedom. A decade ago, after collecting a representative sample of such handbooks from dusty antiquarian bookshops, I put together The Patriot's Handbook as an updated version of that vaunted tradition. It contained a concise introduction to the foundational ideas, documents, events, and personalities of American freedom. It is a citizenship primer for a whole new generation of American patriots. But, I always felt that I should provide a moral philosophy thread to tie those artifacts together into a coherent narrative; thus, this book. Separating fact from fiction, exactitude from nostalgia, and actuality from myth in early American history is often more than a little difficult. Though it is perhaps unwise to have anything like an idealized perception of that great epoch, nevertheless, it is difficult to dismiss the breadth and depth of the fledgling colonial culture and the substantive character of the people who populated it. Living in a day when genuine heroes are few and far between-at best-those pioneers and the times they vivified provide a startling contrast.