The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary
of American independence, yet the nation's founding is controversial now in
ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a
major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the
unique value of their national inheritance.
In the fifth volume of this series, legal
scholars and political scientists discuss how the American Revolution both perpetuated
slavery and created the conditions for its abolition. While hundreds of
thousands of African Americans remained enslaved at the end of the
Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence's assertion of human
equality galvanized slavery's opponents and laid the groundwork for
increasingly egalitarian definitions of American citizenship.
Considering how the Declaration shaped
antislavery thinkers and politicians such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham
Lincoln and informed the 14th Amendment demonstrates how the American
Revolution enabled a "new birth of freedom" in the 19th century.
About the AuthorLevin, Yuval: -
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of
National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at
The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at
National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at
The New York Times.
White, Adam J.: -
Adam J. Whiteis the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and a senior
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme
Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin
Scalia Law School's C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative
State.
Yoo, John: -
John Yoo is a nonresident
senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; the Emanuel S. Heller
Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley; and a senior
research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
Et al...