UConn Historian Pens Fresh Look at Declaration of Independence

STORRS, CT – A UConn historian has presented a fresh look at the reason the Fourth of July is celebrated.

The ideal of equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence was at the core of the founding of the United States on July 4, 1776, he said.

However, the young nation struggled with every form of social inequality despite the declaration that “all men are created equal," he added.

In a new book, Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War, (Yale University Press), Richard D. Brown, board of trustees distinguished professor of history, emeritus at the University of Connecticut, traces how the ideal was tested over issues of race and ethnicity, religious freedom, gender and social class, voting rights and citizenship.

Here are a few excerpts from a UConn Today interview with Brown:

“Early leaders of the United States were clearly in favor of a nation descended from European populations. From the first Naturalization Act in 1790, which enabled any white person to become a citizen, Congress projected the United States as multiethnic and multicultural within the bounds of European.

“The backlash we witness in our own time is based on that same perception of what the United States is and should be – a country of white people of European descent and anybody who is not of European descent is somehow less American.

“America lives with a fundamental and inherent contradiction between individual rights and property rights. There is not exactly a conflict, because Americans regard property rights as integral to individual rights. We believe it is our right to own property and our right to pass our property to our heirs.

“But these beliefs insure that so long as we have a system that enshrines those rights, the United States will have tremendous inequality of wealth. And as long as the United States has great inequalities of wealth, Americans’ ability to realize rights will vary depending on wealth. Consequently, the conflict between equal rights and privilege, or whether all Americans enjoy equal rights, is never going to go away. Our contradictions are built into our political DNA.”

Click here for more information on the book.

Photo Credit: Yale University Press via UConn