Equality
Declaration of Independence (1776)
"Accordingly, Jefferson proclaimed it a 'self-evident' truth that all men were created equal and were endowed by their Creator—and not by their government or any other human authority—with certain rights, including 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Governments existed to secure these rights and derived their powers from the consent of the governed—a crisp statement of the basic principle of self-rule. When a government failed to secure those rights and failed to sustain the consent of the governed, when it evinced a 'design' to deprive the colonists of their liberty, it was no longer a just regime, and the people had the right to abolish and replace it—which is to say, they had a right of revolution. . . . The Declaration was a magnificent and enduringly influential document, read and admired around the world as one of the greatest of all charters of human dignity and freedom. Its eloquence gave immense impetus and plausibility to the colonial cause, while at the same time strengthening the cause of liberty in France and other places around the world."
Race & Slavery
"It would be profoundly wrong to contend, as some do, that the United States was 'founded on' slavery. No, it was founded on other principles entirely, on principles of liberty and self-rule that had been discovered and defined and refined and enshrined through the tempering effects of several turbulent centuries of European and British and American history. Those foundational principles would win out in the end, though not without much struggle and striving, and eventual bloodshed. The United States enjoyed a miraculous birth, but it was not the product of an unstained conception and an untroubled delivery."
Southern Slavery
"The majority of slaveholders were ordinary farmers who owned fewer than twenty slaves and worked in the fields with their slaves. The majority of whites, three-fourths of them by 1860, were not slaveholders at all and were unable to afford the rich low-lying farmland favored by the planters, lived instead in the upcountry, and got their living largely as subsistence farmers. The growing concentration of slaves in fewer and fewer southern hands and the decline of slavery in border states indicated to many Southerners that an end to slavery within the Union was coming. . . .
Dominated as it was by an aristocratic planter class, the Old South in some ways resembled a feudal society, with all the strict social hierarchy that implies. Over time, the resemblance became increasingly self-conscious and was actively embraced by those at the top of the social pyramid. . . . The trouble was that it was not at all obvious how such a vision could be rendered compatible with the idea that all men are created equal or with the energetic individualism and entrepreneurship that Tocqueville had observed."
Anti-Slavery History
"Opposition to slavery had grown steadily since the 1780s and had surfaced again in the controversy over Missouri; by the 1830s, when the movement finally began to coalesce, it was being pursued largely as a religious cause rather than a secular one—a grave and soul-imperiling national sin rather than a mere withholding of rights. . . . The leading abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper called the Liberator and a fervent Quaker, were nearly all evangelical Protestants of some sort; they included among their numbers Theodore Dwight Weld (a protégé of [evangelist Charles] Finney), Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright Jr. Few were as radical as Garrison, however, a forceful and steel-spined man who demanded 'immediate' emancipation and publicly burned a copy of the Constitution and condemned it as a 'proslavery' document, a 'Covenant with Death,' and 'an Agreement with Hell.' Others were willing to work for gradual emancipation, carried out through existing political institutions; the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, supported that position."
Lincoln and Slavery
"Lincoln loathed slavery from his earliest youth—something he shared with his Baptist parents—but his deepest complaint about slavery seemed to be that it was a form of theft, which allowed one class of men to steal from another class the fruit of the latter’s labors. . . . For Lincoln, the restoration and preservation of the Union was the chief goal of the [Civil] war. All other objectives were subordinated to that one. It is important to stress this. It was not until well into the war that the overthrow of slavery became an important part of the Northern agenda. There could be no doubt that the existence of slavery was a central cause of the war; but there also can be no doubt that, as the war began, opposition to slavery was not the central reason why the North embraced a war against secession."
Civil Rights Era (1954-1968)
"[Martin Luther] King repeatedly linked the goals of his movement with the American Dream, the Christian moral tradition, and the great American political heritage of the Declaration and the Constitution—and then asked, how can the African American quest for rights and recognition be seen as anything other than a fulfillment of that dream, that tradition, that heritage? The movement he led was not the repudiation of those things but the full realization of them. The goal of nonviolent resistance was not, King said, the defeat or humiliation of the opponent but the achievement of reconciliation and fellowship with him. Such was the character of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s—determined, dignified, and peaceful, but also provocative, seeking to challenge injustice by flouting unjust laws, and seeking integration into the American mainstream."
Self-Government
American Revolution (1775-1783)
"The Revolution was prosecuted by imperfect individuals who had a mixture of motives, including the purely economic motives of businessmen who did not want to pay taxes and the political conflicts among the competing social classes in the colonies themselves. Yet self-rule was at the heart of it all. Self-rule had been the basis for the flourishing of these colonies; self-rule was the basis for their revolution; self-rule continued to be a central element in the American experiment in all the years to come."
Citizenship
Patriotism
"There is a strong tendency in modern American society to treat patriotism as a dangerous sentiment, a passion to be guarded against. But this is a serious misconception. To begin with, we should acknowledge that there is something natural about patriotism, as an expression of love for what is one’s own, gratitude for what one has been given, and reverence for the sources of one’s being. These responses are instinctive; they’re grounded in our natures and the basic facts of our birth. Yet their power is no less for that, and they are denied only at great cost."
Immigration
"Immigration had, of course, always been a theme of American history, and the idea of America as an asylum for the world, a land of hope, had been firmly in place even before the nation’s founding. What were the New England Puritans, after all, but a group of hope-filled immigrants seeking their Zion in the American wilderness? . . .
Why did they come? Some came for the same reasons that immigrants had always come to America: to escape the poverty, famine, and religious or political persecution of their native lands. But many more were pulled to America by its promise than were pushed to it by the conditions in their homelands. Those who had seen relatives become successful in America were inclined to follow in their wake, and in time whole extended families were affected. . . . [T]he ideal of America as a melting pot was not realized in the short term; on the contrary, it was more of a salad for recent immigrants and a stew for the more acclimated, meaning that the distinct elements of immigrant groups retained their distinctiveness and did not melt immediately into the alloy of the larger culture. . . .
We should not forget the countless human dramas that immigration entailed, the immense losses that came with every gain. Even assimilation, when it was successful, had its bitter side, in the experience of grandmothers and grandfathers who watched their progeny grow up, and away from them, into a culture and language they did not understand and could never enter into fully without denying their very identities—even if those identities had been rooted in a world that no longer existed outside their memories."
U.S. Constitution
"Constitution Day, which we observe every September 17, is a singularly American holiday, even more unique than the Fourth of July. After all, many nations have their great leaders and laborers, their war heroes, their monuments, and their days of independence. But there is only one nation on earth that can point with pride to a written Constitution that is more than 230 years old, a continuously authoritative expression of fundamental law that stands at the very center of our national life. . . .
As such, the U.S. Constitution is not merely our most weighty legal document; it is also an expression of who and what we are. Other countries, such as France, have lived under many different constitutions and kinds of government over the centuries, so that for them, the French nation is something separable from the form of government that happens to be in power at any given time. No so for Americans, who have lived since the 1780s under one regime, a remarkable fact whose significance nevertheless seems to escape us. Yes, we do revere our Constitution, but we do so blandly and automatically, without troubling ourselves to know very much about it, and without reflecting much on what our Constitution says about our national identity."
Religion
"Since religion lies at the very roots of culture, an examination of this question should begin with a look at the path of religion’s development in the years after the Revolution. The first thing to notice is that the remarkable partnership of Protestantism and Enlightenment rationalism, that easy harmony of potential antagonists that had been such a notable feature of the latter years of the eighteenth century, was beginning to fray in the nineteenth, as the former partners began to go their separate ways—although, as we shall see, it is also notable that there remained important points of similarity, even as the separation was occurring.
On the elite level, more and more of those in the established churches of the North found the Calvinist belief in innate human depravity to be too dour and negative and, moreover, out of phase with the steadily improving world that they saw emerging around them. They were increasingly drawn to more rational and Enlightened offshoots of Christianity, such as Deism and Unitarianism, both of which declined to affirm the divinity of Christ and other supernatural elements of Christian orthodoxy. . . . Some of the most important leaders of the revolutionary generation, such as Jefferson and Franklin, had already been drawn in that direction. . ."
Second Great Awakening (1790-1840)
"A Second Great Awakening had already begun in the years around 1800, led by men like Yale’s president Timothy Dwight, a Jonathan Edwards–like figure who attempted to return that campus, which had declined into a 'hotbed of infidelity,' to something closer to its uber-Puritan beginnings. . . . The ministers who worked the frontier had adapted their message to the circumstances; instead of preaching sophisticated Calvinism, they offered a simple and direct message of personal salvation, easily grasped by anyone. Traveling revivals became a fixture of frontier life, and tireless Methodist 'circuit riders' such as Francis Asbury and Peter Cartwright provided a moveable evangelism in which the church came to the people themselves. Cartwright, a man of astonishing stamina, delivered a sermon a day for more than twenty years, all the while riding a circuit that took in several states and presented all the rugged challenges and perils of frontier travel. The heroic efforts of him and others like him soon built Methodism into the largest Christian denomination in America."
American Culture
Nineteenth Century
"A century and half ago, bucolic little Concord, Massachusetts, was a hub of the American literary and cultural universe. One could hardly think of a more illustrious circle of American writers than Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller. All of them knew one another, lived in or near Concord at roughly the same time, and wrote many of their most important works there. Indeed, all of them (with the exception of Fuller, who died in a shipwreck) are also buried there today. There is perhaps no single location in all of American literary history weightier in literary lore and more alive with the sense of possibility—precisely the sense of possibility that has always been one of the chief glories of American life.
These writers shared a fascination with the cluster of ideas and ideals that go under the rubric of Transcendentalism, a romantic variant that stressed the glories of the vast, the mysterious, and the intuitive. It sought to replace the sin-soaked supernaturalist dogma of orthodox Christianity and the tidy rationality of Unitarianism with a sprawling romantic and eclectic form of natural piety that bordered on pantheism. It placed the ideal of the majestic, isolated, and inviolable Self at the center of its thought, and at the center of Nature itself. Indeed, Nature and the Self were two expressions of the same thing. 'Nature is the opposite of the soul,' Emerson wrote in 1837, 'answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.' The vastness of Nature’s external panorama was exactly matched by the vastness of the soul’s interior estate. Both were part and parcel of the Universal Soul that superintended all things."
Early Twentieth Century
"New and distinctively American forms of popular music, combining elements of jazz, blues, and conventional concert music, also began to emerge and find a large popular following. African Americans moving north during the First World War—figures such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—brought their musical arts with them, contributing to the development of a fresh American sound. . . .
In 1900, the only comparable entertainment had been the crude nickelodeon; by 1929, the movies had taken the country by storm, moving quickly through a black-and-white silent period into 'talkies,' such as the breakthrough 1927 work The Jazz Singer, and featuring an array of celebrity 'stars,' such as Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Rudolph Valentino, whose doings on and off the set, skillfully amplified by press agents and image makers, became the stuff of newspaper columns and back-fence gossip all over the country."
Foreign Policy
American Foreign Policy (1776-1917)
"I have called it a respite, but many…believed it to be America’s natural and permanent state, as a continental republic insulated from the world’s woes by the protective buffer of two large oceans and endowed with a lavish array of natural resources, enough to make it largely self-sufficient for the foreseeable future. Such a conception of America could be said to have roots going back to the idea of being a 'city upon a hill,' although in this instance serving not as a religious exemplar but as a republican one, a model and inspiration for the ennoblement of the rest of the world. It was further upheld by the tenor of George Washington’s much-revered Farewell Address, particularly by its insistence that the United States avoid contracting any permanent alliances or other enduring entanglements in the affairs of other countries—particularly not in the quarrelsome countries of Western Europe. A certain disposition toward apartness seemed to be part of the American character and the American mission."
Monroe Doctrine (1823)
"The gist of the Doctrine was fairly simple: the western hemisphere was henceforth to be considered off limits to further European colonization, and any effort to the contrary, including European meddling or subversion in the newly independent former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America, would be regarded as 'the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States” and 'dangerous to our peace and safety.' . . . The statement also included a promise not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of the European powers; the United States would stay clear of European wars and would not meddle in European internal affairs, just as it expected Europe to stay out of American affairs. Responding in 1821 to a request for help from Greek revolutionaries rising up to fight the Ottoman Empire, John Quincy Adams proclaimed that the United States 'goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . Her glory is not dominion, but liberty.'"
Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941)
“Early on the peaceful Sunday morning of December 7, Pearl Harbor was attacked by 353 carrier-borne Japanese warplanes—a mix of fighters, level bombers, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers—arriving in two separate waves. They caught Pearl Harbor completely unaware and battered it for two hours, leaving the Pacific Fleet in shambles. All eight U.S. battleships were either sunk or heavily damaged, while a dozen other vessels were put out of operational order, 188 planes were destroyed, and twenty-four hundred servicemen were killed. It was a shocking blow, and yet only a part of the vast Japanese plan, which over the course of seven hours included roughly simultaneous attacks on the United States in the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It was an ambitious and well-executed plan."
Cold War (1947-1991)
"Historians will argue for many years about the relative importance of Reagan and Gorbachev in the vast improvement of Soviet–American relations. Both were transformational leaders. But in some sense, both needed one another. There had to be a man like Gorbachev, a reform-minded leader who was willing to break through the ossified structure of an inert and dehumanizing Soviet system to try for something better. But there had to be a Reagan, too, whose clarity and determination, and whose success in restoring the American economy and its military strength, limited the options that were open to Gorbachev."
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