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Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official--a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women's suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow--but without the voices from afar, there would have been no cho..
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Jon Meacham |
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The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: "one of the choice ones of the earth." --
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Jon Meacham |
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Intellectually I know America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country," the novelist Sinclair Lewis" --
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Jon Meacham |
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Horace Walpole, the writer and politician, meanwhile, once saw Mademoiselle la Chevaliere d'Eon, known in her day as a transvestite-diplomat-spy, teaching fencing to the Cosways' guests in the midst of a party.16,17
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Jon Meacham |
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Americans are driven by many forces, and chief among those forces--and thus a formative element in the country's soul--is the "pursuit of happiness" of which Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. When he composed those words in his rented second-floor quarters at Seventh and Market in Philadelphia in late June, 1776, Jefferson was not thinking about happiness in only the sense of good cheer. He and his colleagues were contempl..
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Jon Meacham |
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Garry Wills's classic 1978 book on the Declaration, Inventing America, put it well: "When Jefferson spoke of pursuing happiness," Wills wrote, "he had nothing vague or private in mind. He meant public happiness which is measurable; which is, indeed, the test and justification of any government."
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Jon Meacham |
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Writing in 1903, the scholar, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois observed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and, while Du Bois was surely right, it is correct, too, to say that color in some ways remains the problem of American history as a whole."
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Jon Meacham |
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William L. Shirer, who had covered Nazi Germany, wrote on returning home. "I had seen these poisons grow into ugly witch hunting and worse in the totalitarian lands abroad, but I was not prepared to find them taking root in our own splendid democracy."
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Jon Meacham |
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White men alone must manage the South," Johnson remarked in 1865. Two years later, in 1867, the president asserted that blacks were incapable of self-government. "No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands," Johnson wrote in his annual message. "On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism." It was, the historian Eric Foner..
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Jon Meacham |