These Truths

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

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,

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,”

War between supporters of the king and backers of Parliament broke out in 1642. During this battle, the legal fiction of the divine right of kings was replaced by another legal fiction: the sovereignty of the people.

John Milton—later the author of Paradise Lost—published a pamphlet in which he argued against a law passed by Parliament requiring printers to secure licenses from the government for everything they printed. No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be establ

Archbishop Isidore of Seville, writing an encyclopedia called the Etymologiae that circulated widely in manuscript—as many as a thousand handwritten copies survive—had drawn the world as a circle surrounded by oceans and divided by seas into three bodies of land, Asia, Europe, and Africa, inhabited by the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Shem

Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage.

What had happened between the Virginia charter and the Declaration of Independence to convince so many people that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed? The answer lies in artifacts as different as a deerskin cloak and a scarlet robe

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