100 books like Our Declaration

The U.S. Constitution is the document that spells out the framework of American government. In contrast, the Declaration is something of a “one and done” document; interesting for historical reasons, but not relevant to modern governance.

And yet…of the two documents, the Declaration of Independence has a stronger hold on American emotions. Both documents have their own holiday, but not many Americans celebrate Constitution Day, which falls on each September 17th, reserving fireworks and outdoor meals for the Fourth of July instead.

Why? According to the late MIT historian Pauline Maier, the Declaration has become a kind of sacred artifact that spells out the nation’s moral beliefs, even if those beliefs boil down to a single sentence about equality, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Maier shows us how that transformation occurred. She walks us through many other obscure government documents during the Founding Era to… show more.

When I was kid, it was a rite of passage to watch the movie version of this musical with my parents on TV during Fourth of July week in the U.S.. I’ve since seen regional theater productions as well.

Yes, the play is fun and funny, but what did not sink in until I’d done my own research into the lives of the signers was how marvelously the words and lyrics lay out the history. When one of the flashy South Carolina delegates sings “Molasses to Rum,” you understand the underlying economics of the slave trade. The songs still hold up and advance the plot, as all great Broadway songs must do.

But if you miss the words in the 1972 film or modern staged versions, the only way to absorb it all is to dip into the official libretto itself.

Unless they’ve looked at the history, modern Americans often have the impression that all colonists at the time favored independence.

I’d argue that Americans see the Fourth of July—the holiday devoted to the U.S.’s birthday—as inevitable. Nothing was further from the truth. Independence was never in the cards when the battle with Britain began in 1775 at Lexington and Concord. Hogeland, a masterful historian and writer, brings to life the drama that led to the vote to break with Britain’s monarch.

Focusing tightly on the spring and summer of 1776, Declaration shows the clashing temperaments of all the players, how they tried to outmaneuver each other, but ultimately came together for the good of a nascent nation. We also learn a good deal about how ordinary citizens reacted to the news of the Declaration.

This is a great book for kids! With charming illustrations by Michael McCurdy, The Signers tells the personal story of every signer in a way that makes the story behind the Fourth of July engaging for young readers.

Fradin also knows just how to explain complicated issues such as slavery, or matters surrounding 18th-century life that would be lost on most adults, let alone kids. Now yes, the book is intended for readers in grades 4 through 7, but I think it is a fine jumping-off point for teachers and homeschoolers looking for short biographical readings that shed light what life was like for these men and their families during a pivotal time in American history.

Americans are reared on the myth that we are all created equal.

But this myth can have negative effects in a highly stratified society, where the richest 5% of families have 248 times as much wealth as the second richest 20% of the population and where racial discrimination permeates every aspect of life.

In this classic work, Lewis shows how the myth of equal opportunity “individualizes” success and failure. The belief that each individual earns success or is responsible for failure contributes to a public ethos in which the poor are blamed for their plight and the rich lack compassion for the worst off. 

The book illuminates the profound policy consequences of these beliefs for public education, crime, race relations, and poverty reduction.

Any discussion of how people and nature relate to each other in the twenty-first century will come up against the issue of climate change. And there are so many good books to read on the topic – Elizabeth Rush’s Rising comes right to mind, or the collection All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson. What Tale of Two Planets offers is a global perspective on rising seas, changing seasons, and damaging weather through genres from poetry to prose to fiction. Each author brings clarity to the science and politics of climate change, but the sections here are also portraits of love for place and community. If you’ve never read a book on climate change before, it’s a great start; if you’ve read them all, there’s something new and beautiful here.

In 2016 I went to a conference in Leuven, Belgium, on computational approaches to understanding science. There I presented a model showing how selection for productivity (good old “publish or perish”) could, over time, degrade the quality of methods used by scientists.

I also met Cailin O’Connor, a philosopher and game theorist who was also studying science with formal models, with a focus on equity, or lack thereof. In this terrific book, Cailin uses game theory and evolutionary dynamics to consider how some social institutions lead to entrenched inequality among people or social classes, as well as how one might combat the forces of unfairness. 

Having read Robert Nozick’s philosophical defence of free markets, Anarchy, State and Utopia, in my early twenties, I started searching for a comprehensive rebuttal. With Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, my search came to an end. Cohen — who sadly is no longer with us — was a gifted analytical philosopher who developed his critique of Nozick and other free marketeers over many years. The book delivers a clear and powerful distillation of his thought, which corroborates the intuition felt by many of us that there is something profoundly wrong with the conflation of freedom with free markets. 

This book provides a grand sociological theoretical framework to explain how society creates and maintains persistent inequality through grouping.

The author does not anchor his explanation in individual biases and discriminatory acts, which are manifestations of larger fundamental structures and dynamics. The division and organization of the population into categories produce systemic group advantages and enable hierarchical exploitation.

Several organizational mechanisms within and between groups make categorical inequality durable. Race is one of the fundamental ways society is fragmented into enduring and unequal groups.

Atkinson died in January 2017. His life’s academic work focused on the causes of inequality and poverty. He had a particular interest in policy in these areas which is reflected in this book which offers a rationale for and a detailed account of how household income can be made more equal.

He is concerned with inequality in developed countries, so his focus is on the US, UK, and European countries. He first sets out how it is that income inequality has so greatly increased covering some of the same ground as Milanovic. He then, in chapters on progressive taxation and social security, sets out detailed proposals which he argues would considerably reduce inequality and promote social justice.

His proposals on progressive taxation would, it can be safely asserted, reduce Tory MPs to apoplexy.