Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Coke claimed that the king’s authority was constrained by Magna Carta.38 At Coke’s suggestion, Parliament then prepared and delivered to King Charles a Petition of Right,

Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.

One million Europeans migrated to British America between 1600 and 1800 and two and a half million Africans were carried there by force

to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.

Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains, what’s left behind,

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable,”

Under what conditions do some people have a right to rule, or to rebel, and others not? In 1640, King Charles at last summoned a meeting of Parliament in hopes of raising money to suppress a rebellion in Scotland. The newly summoned Parliament, striking back, passed a law abridging the king’s authority,

Out of this same quarrel came foundational ideas about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, ideas premised on the belief, heretical to the medieval church, that there is no conflict between freedom and truth.