Books, Arts & Manners: Dangerous Declaration?

American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, by Pauline Maier (Knopf, 352 pp., $27.50)

PAULINE Maier is an American historian who does not disdain the office of storyteller to the American people. She tells here a story she rightly thinks worth telling: how in the year following Lexington and Concord the Continental Congress moved to the decision to fight for national independence; how Americans supported and explained the decision in more than ninety “other declarations of independence” (instructions to congressional delegates and to state representatives, town-meeting resolutions, state-constitution preambles, and other documents); and how the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, was shaped. She goes on to the subsequent history of the Declaration, as it became an authority appealed to in serious political disputes and an object of popular veneration.

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R. S. Hill

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Declaration of Independence

American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, by Pauline Maier (Knopf, 352 pp., $27.50)

PAULINE Maier is an American historian who does not disdain the office of storyteller to the American people. She tells here a story she rightly thinks worth telling: how in the year following Lexington and Concord the Continental Congress moved to the decision to fight for national independence; how Americans supported and explained the decision in more than ninety “other declarations of independence” (instructions to congressional delegates and to state representatives, town-meeting resolutions, state-constitution preambles, and other documents); and how the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, was shaped. She goes on to the subsequent history of the Declaration, as it became an authority appealed to in serious political disputes and an object of popular veneration.