For over a century scholars have analyzed and interpreted the meaning and context of the Declaration of Independence in myriad ways. As Barry Alan Shain points out, “Intellectual historians and political theorists have made every effort to make the Declaration's theoretically rich second paragraph the foundation of all manner of American political thought and creeds. . . . There are, a minimum, seven competing schools of interpretation.”
The documents presented in this edition help in understanding the Declaration and the Revolutionary War against the backdrop provided by the hundreds of continental-level congressional state papers––declarations, petitions, resolutions, and proclamations––and the debates and correspondence of those in attendance at the first national congresses.
Barry Alan Shain is professor of political science and chair of the political science department at Colgate University. He is the author ofThe Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought and the editor ofThe Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond. He also contributed to Liberty Fund's collection of secondary writings, titledLiberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century.
