Richard D. Brown, “Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War” (Yale UP, 2017)

New Books in Law · Feb 13, 2018 · 1h 1m

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class…