Overview

On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked, What to the slave is the Fourth of July? The audience had invited him to speak on the day celebrating freedom, and had expected him to offer a hopeful message about America; instead, he'd offered back to them their own hypocrisy. How could the Constitution defend both freedom and slavery? How could it celebrate liberty with one hand while withdrawing it with another? Theirs was a country which promoted and even celebrated inequality. From the very beginning, American history can be seen as a battle to reconcile the large gap between America's stated ideals and the reality of its republic. Its struggle is not one of steady progress toward greater freedom and equality, but rather for every step forward there is a step taken in a different direction. In Inventing Equality, Michael Bellesiles traces the evolution of the battle for true equality--the stories of those fighting forward, to expand the working definition of what it means to be an American citizen--from the Revolution through the late nineteenth century. He identifies the systemic flaws in the Constitution, and explores through the role of the Supreme Court and three Constitutional amendments--the 13th, 14th, and 15th--the ways in which equality and inequality waxed and waned over the decades.

Full Product Details

9781665197762

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Michael A. Bellesiles, once a visiting professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and a professor of history at Emory University, is the author of numerous books on American history-including 1877 and A People's History of the U.S. Military. Bellesiles received his BA from the University of California-Santa Cruz and his PhD from the University of California at Irvine. He lives in Connecticut. Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration. Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available