The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, known collectively as the Charters of Freedom, have guaranteed the rights and freedoms of Americans for over 200 years. This book, published to accompany an exhibition at the National Archives in Wash., D.C., studies the dramatic events and philosophies which guided the Founding Fathers in the creation of these historic documents, the profound effect they have exercised on subsequent American history, and their wider influence on world politics. Specially commissioned color photos of the newly reinstalled Charters complement a selection of original documents, which include some of America¿s greatest documentary treasures.

"This new book, published to accompany an exhibition at the National Archives, studies the dramatic events and philosophies which guided the Founding Fathers in the creation of these historic documents, the profound effect they have exercised on subsequent American history, and their wider influence on world politics." "Specially commissioned color photographs of the newly reinstalled Charters complement a selection of original documents, which include some of America's greatest documentary treasures. Additional images include color plates of the restored murals, which adorn the renovated Rotunda, and paintings and engravings of the major figures and events in American history, which enhance the original documents. Quotes from the nation's Founders and other historic figures are also included, together with an accessible narrative text arranged to reflect each of the fourteen sections making up the exhibit. Together these elements reveal the drama, passion, and poignancy of the struggle for freedom that has defined much of U.S. history."--BOOK JACKET.

Why does the world speak English? Why does every country at least pretend to aspire to representative government, personal freedom, and an independent judiciary? In The New Road to Serfdom, British politician Daniel Hannan exhorted Americans not to abandon the principles that have made our country great. Inventing Freedom is a much more ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of those principles, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled. According to Hannan, the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms—individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government—are not broadly "Western" in the usual sense of the term. Rather they are the legacy of a very specific tradition, one that was born in England and that we Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited. The first English kingdoms, as they emerged from the Dark Ages, already had unique characteristics that would develop into what we now call constitutional government. By the tenth century, a thousand years before most modern countries, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to define themselves with reference to inherited common-law rights. The story of liberty is the story of how that model triumphed. How, repressed after the Norman Conquest, it reasserted itself; how it developed during the civil wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the modern liberal-democratic tradition; how it was enshrined in a series of landmark victories—the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the U.S. Constitution—and how it came to defeat every international rival. Yet there was nothing inevitable about it. Anglosphere values could easily have been snuffed out in the 1940s. And they would not be ascendant today if the Cold War had ended differently. Today we see those ideas abandoned and scorned in the places where they once went unchallenged. The current U.S. president, in particular, seems determined to deride and traduce the Anglosphere values that the Founders took for granted. Inventing Freedom explains why the extraordinary idea that the state was the servant, not the ruler, of the individual evolved uniquely in the English-speaking world. It is a chronicle of the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism. And it is offered at a time that may turn out to be the end of the age of political freedom.