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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Britain and the American Dream

Audiobook
71 of 71 copies available
71 of 71 copies available
The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down—and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America.
Peter Moore's Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the "American dream." Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 3, 2023
      Historian Moore (Endeavour) offers a rich and immersive intellectual history of the American Revolution focused on its roots in Enlightenment era Britain. At the center are six interconnected figures who embodied the “complex” relationship between England and its colonies in North America and whose ideas influenced the famous phrase “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence: founding father Benjamin Franklin, who spent much of the period in London, where he felt it was “his particular, peculiar destiny to be making America’s case alone”; journalist Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense “advocated for independence and nothing else”; lexicographer Samuel Johnson, a skeptic of “modern, progressive, Whiggish society” who argued that the colonists “wanted Britain to have dominion without authority, and for them to be subjects without subordination”; radical politician John Wilkes, whose slogan in the 1760s was “Wilkes and Liberty!”; republican sympathizer Catharine Macaulay, whose History of England would be more celebrated in America than Britain; and London printer William Strahan, whose friendship with Franklin was sorely tested by their differences of opinion over the proper relationship between the colonies and the Crown. The portrait of Franklin and Strahan’s relationship is especially well done, and Moore’s fluid prose is infused with the “boisterous” excitement of the era, when “people knew they were living at a loaded moment in history.” This is a pleasure.

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  • English

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