In conjunction with YaleUniversity Press and Richard D. Brown, Age of Revolutions is proud to offer its eight revolutionary raffle. Brown gave AoR readers a look into his recent book Self-Evident Truths in his recent post entitled “What was Revolutionary about 1776?” Check out his post and enter for a chance to win Brown’s new book!.
Subscribe to the website below in order to enter your name in the drawing for Self-Evident Truths. With your subscription, you will receive Age of Revolutions posts in your email box. Subscribing now will also automatically qualify you for future book giveaways.
Subscribe before 11:59 PM EST, March 26 for a chance to win!
Christopher Minty is the winner!
“How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice? In this broadly synthetic work, distinguished historian Richard Brown shows that despite its founding statement that “all men are created equal,” the early Republic struggled with every form of social inequality. While people paid homage to the ideal of equal rights, this ideal came up against entrenched social and political practices and beliefs.
Brown illustrates how the ideal was tested in struggles over race and ethnicity, religious freedom, gender and social class, voting rights and citizenship. He shows how high principles fared in criminal trials and divorce cases when minorities, women, and people from different social classes faced judgment. This book offers a much-needed exploration of the ways revolutionary political ideas penetrated popular thinking and everyday practice.”
Initial Reviews
“In Self–Evident Truths, Richard D. Brown offers a lucid, profound, original, probing, and often moving examination of the elusive and conflicting pursuits of equality in the American past and present.” – Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History
“Richard Brown shows in this erudite, well-argued book that the radical rallying cry of ‘all men are created equal’ helped inspire numerous Americans to fight in politics and the courts to make the ideal of equality a reality.”—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
“Richard D. Brown likes to take on huge historical problems that span decades and clarify them for us. In this superb book dealing with the conflict over equal rights in antebellum America, he has done it again, and once more we are in his debt.”—Gordon S. Wood, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Radicalism of the American Revolution
“Self-Evident Truths is a tribute to a revolutionary ideal of equal rights and to America’s fitful and uneven attempts to realize it in the decades after independence. With elegance and insight, Richard Brown guides us past the privilege of the founders to show us how they and generations of Americans after them took the promise of the Declaration of Independence seriously enough to act on it, if often imperfectly, across the range of religion, ethnicity, gender, age, class, and even race.”—Bruce Mann, author of Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence
“In a broad-ranging , deeply researched, and marvelously lucid study, master historian Richard Brown explores the extraordinarily contested nature of the debate over equality from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Brown’s fascinating book could not be more timely or revealing.”—Rosemarie Zagarri, author of Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic
“The commitment to human equality forged in the Declaration of Independence has inspired and haunted Americans ever since 1776. In this penetrating analysis, Richard Brown carefully explores how Americans began to explain and advance what the commitment could actually mean.”—Jack N. Rakove, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
“Lucidly presented . . . Brown explores the alternate widening and narrowing of the gap between ideology and reality with regard to the concept of equal rights, and shows Americans of all backgrounds attempting to adjust the balance to their advantage.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A valuable contribution to the history of the early republic and to the scholarly literature of civil rights.”—Kirkus
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