Overview

"The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. ""The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness"" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with ""the preservation of."" The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down--and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America. Peter Moore's Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the ""American dream."" Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had ""life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution."

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"Lee delivers an impeccable performance of a narrative rich in wit, character portrayals, and fresh insights on how the American Revolution came about.-- ""AudioFile"""

Author Information

Peter Moore is an English writer, historian, and lecturer. He is the author of Endeavour and The Weather Experiment, which were both Sunday Times bestsellers in the United Kingdom. The Weather Experiment was also chosen as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015. He teaches at the University of Oxford, has lectured internationally on eighteenth century history, and hosts a history podcast called Travels Through Time. British narrator John Lee has read audiobooks in almost every conceivable genre, from Charles Dickens to Patrick O'Brian, and from the very real life of Napoleon to the entirely imagined lives of sorcerers and swashbucklers. He has won numerous Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards, and he was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile in 2009. Lee is also an accomplished stage actor and wrote and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit.

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