The Declaration of Independence: American Legacies and Global Promises

Presented on: Wednesday, July 1st at 1:00 PM EDT



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Philadelphia. Summer. 1776. While temperatures and tensions were running high, delegates from across the Atlantic seaboard weighed the proper relationship between Britain and its American colonial possessions. These sometimes heated conversations followed from a very specific historical context. But, the debates in Philadelphia that summer emerged from the British philosophical tradition. The debates culminated in the Declaration of Independence, which begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” What does it mean to declare that all men are created equal? That they are endowed at the moment of their very creation with rights? To define the most fundamental of those rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The course of American history since 1776, some would argue, has been the work of fulfilling – if, sometimes, in halting steps – these statements. Indeed, some would suggest that the all-embracing implications of these claims – all are endowed by a Creator assumed to be universal – that the history of fulfilling these statements has been the work of global history since 1776. Join Professor Natalie Taylor, Chair of Skidmore’s Department of Political Science, and Tillman Nechtman, Chair of Skidmore’s Department of History, as they explore the national and global history of the Declaration of Independence, a conversation based upon lectures from the course they team-teach “The History and Political Thought of the American Revolution.” Some alumni may recall taking this course, as it was originally conceived and taught by Professor Tad Kuroda (History) and Erwin Levine (Political Science), whose collective legacy continue to shape and inspire Professors Taylor and Nechtman today. Tillman W. Nechtman is a Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Skidmore College. He is an historian of Britain and its global empire. His research has focused on topics as wide-ranging as eighteenth-century British India and the nineteenth-century South Pacific. He has published in journals like History Compass, The Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He has published two books with Cambridge University Press: Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2010) and, most recently The Pretender of Pitcairn Island: Joshua W. Hill – The Man Who Would Be King Among The Bounty Mutineers (2018). Natalie Fuehrer Taylor is Associate Professor & Chair of the Political Science Department. She has taught American political thought and courses in the history of western political philosophy since joining Skidmore’s faculty in 2002. She is the author of The Rights of Chimera: the Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft and the editor of A Political Companion to Henry Adams. She has also contributed chapters on second-wave feminism and its legacy to volumes, such as American Political Thought, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby: Women, Politics, & Popular Culture and Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America .