Analyzing the Declaration

  "Yet if the Declaration resembles a wedding, it bears an even closer kinship to divorce" (p. 94 of hardcover)

This week's focus question: Identify one word, phrase, or passage in the Declaration that you understood differently after reading Chapters 1–18 of Our Declaration. What did you previously think it meant, what does Allen argue it means, and which interpretation do you find more convincing? Why?

For Monday: Allen, ch. 19-43. First writing assignment.

For Wednesday: Allen 44-45,  Douglass, Stevens  

(Frederick Douglass and Stephen A. Douglas were not the same guy.) 

Model UN.  The UN raises the question: to whom do people owe allegiance?

This book is not just about the Declaration, but about political writing in general.

Examples of democratic/group writing

• The Constitution
• Presidential speeches
• Supreme Court opinions
• Congressional markup

REVIEW: Functions of writing

• Performance
• Record-setting: memoranda
• Persuasion

Framing

"The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America"

• Why states instead of colonies?
• Other examples of name changes: countries, historical figures, fictional characters.

 `When in the course of human events Latin cursus, meaning "flow" --a tide e-ventus "outcome"it becomes necessary .."

• Why course?
• “The course can be altered – with strenuous effort” (Allen, p. 111)

" for one people to dissolve the political bands, which have connected them with another and to assume, among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station"

• What is a “nation”? Shared cultural life, having or wanting their own government.
• What holds us together?
• What is a “station”? (Allen, p. 119) -- Latin for “stand.”

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION!

Compare "separate and equal" with "separate but equal."

• Keep in mind for our discussion of Lincoln's Second Inaugural:  "And the war came" means something radically different from "But the war came."

What does it mean to be equal? "But `equal' and `same" are not synonyms" (107).

"to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them"

Spinoza -- TJ himself was a Deist. Locke: "The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life,health, liberty or possessions."

•  King’s concept of natural law (by Danielle Allen's dad!)
•  Compare and contrast to Jefferson? – Editors added more God -- why?

 a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

• Address to the whole world (France, in particular)
• Impel (Allen, pp. 115-116) – to be pushed