#All men are created equal series#
#All men are created equal free#

“So much of Terry’s intellectual awareness just clicked at that moment. “The discovery, specifically that the phrase Terry had known for a long time, ‘separate but equal’ had this eerie precursor,” provided an intellectual spark in the class, Allen says. But, the passage continues, “the phrase ‘separate but equal,’ was used to do work exactly opposite of that done by the Declaration: not to raise a people to sovereign status but to keep many people subjected and dependent.” Terry, Allen says, called this “the most important moment in the class.”

#All men are created equal free#

The original phrase clearly expressed the Colonists’ intention to “stand as separate and equal to other powers of the earth,” Allen writes in her book, and declared the colonists free of British domination. Her methodical examination of the Declaration’s text-always rich in historical context and with careful attention to the founders’ political design-is best captured in her discussion of the phrase “Separate and Equal,” encountered in the Declaration’s opening sentence.Īllen explains how a student named Terry in the night class quickly connected the original term with its insidious modern version-Separate BUT Equal, a notorious 1950’s segregationist justification for Jim Crow. Allen, in conversation with her students, makes the document, with its clarity and sense of collective national embrace, come alive. But the book is really about the language of the Declaration of Independence how the founding fathers’ linguistic precision and eloquence combined to inspire and propel the early American polity to liberty. The adult students really got that.” Allen’s ability to bring the vivid history of the creation of the Declaration of Independence to life for these students-no less than their process of engaging and, ultimately, claiming the Declaration as their own-is how this book was developed.Īllen uses Our Declaration to recount the lives and contributions the founding fathers the book also brings John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Richard Henry Lee to life as people and political visionaries. Some of the dead we don’t like, and some of them we do.”īoth sets of students found their own way to the meaning of the Declaration, she says, but the poor and working students from the South Side of Chicago grasped that the Declaration offered “things that people had to say about how they worked their way through life.

#All men are created equal series#

While the daytime students also had “intellectual curiousity,” Allen said the night students viewed the Declaration of Independence more personally, as if they were a series of “messages from the dead about life. The daytime “formal” University of Chicago students “were kids that had gotten good grades all the way through and wanted a good grade now.” But the students in the night class “took you back to the idea of texts for the sake of texts,” Allen said.

It was an intellectual experience that differed for each separate set of students. I was a new-comer to the University of Chicago and my immediate reaction was that this is exactly the kind of class I have always wanted to teach,” Allen said during a Skype interview with PW from Princeton.ĭuring her time teaching these classes at the University of Chicago, Allen and her students wrestled with the language and the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, probing and responding to the document. “They were trying to get these classes started. Beginning in 2000 at the University of Chicago, Allen, a political philosopher, taught elite University of Chicago students during the day and at night taught low-income students-older, African American, working students, who were sometimes unemployed, and many with children-in a series of classes called the Odyssey Project.Ī collaboration between the University of Chicago and the Illinois Humanities Council, the Odyssey Project was based on The Clemente Courses, a program founded by educator Earl Shorris, a University of Chicago graduate from the 1960s, who believed that having access to and engaging with great works of literature and history was the way out of poverty for minority students. We all have beating hearts and lively minds.”Īllen is the author of the recently published Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Norton/Liveright, June). It didn’t matter the background from which the students started. “For me one of the Declaration’s great lessons and spiritual qualities is this amazing conviction it has in the intellectual capacity of ordinary human beings,” says Danielle Allen, professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in reference to a course on the Declaration of Independence that she taught for many years at the University of Chicago.