Self-Evident Truths
Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War
Yale University Press, March 2017
Hardcover, 400 pages
ISBN: 9780300197112
How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice? In this broadly synthetic work, distinguished historian Richard Brown shows that despite its founding statement that “all men are created equal,” the early Republic struggled with every form of social inequality. While people paid homage to the ideal of equal rights, this ideal came up against entrenched social and political practices and beliefs.
Brown illustrates how the ideal was tested in struggles over race and ethnicity, religious freedom, gender and social class, voting rights and citizenship. He shows how high principles fared in criminal trials and divorce cases when minorities, women, and people from different social classes faced judgment. This book offers a much-needed exploration of the ways revolutionary political ideas penetrated popular thinking and everyday practice.
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Praise for Self-Evident Truths
Publishers Weekly
(Starred Review)
"Lucidly presented... Brown explores the alternate widening and narrowing of the gap between ideology and reality with regard to the concept of equal rights, and shows Americans of all backgrounds attempting to adjust the balance to their advantage."
Kirkus Review
"A valuable contribution to the history of the early republic and to the scholarly literature of civil rights."
The Nation
"In Self-Evident Truths... readers are left with a persuasive picture of pre–Civil War society as riven by a wide variety of formal arguments over not just the legitimacy of slavery but the meaning and reach of equality in the United States at large.
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Winner of the 2018 New England Historical Association Book Award
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Finalist for the Sally & Morris Lasky Prize for the Best Book in American Political History Published in 2017
What Historians are Saying About Self-Evident Truths:
"The commitment to human equality forged in the Declaration of Independence has inspired and haunted Americans ever since 1776. In this penetrating analysis, Richard Brown carefully explores how Americans began to explain and advance what the commitment could actually mean."
Jack N. Rakove, Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of Original Meanings: Politics and
Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
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"In Self-Evident Truths, Richard D. Brown offers a lucid, profound, original, probing, and often moving examination of the elusive and conflicting pursuits of equality in the American past and present."
Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions:
A Continental History
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"In a broad-ranging, deeply researched, and marvelously lucid study, master historian Richard Brown explores the extraordinarily contested nature of the debate over equality from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Brown’s fascinating book could not be more timely or revealing."
Rosemarie Zagarri, author of
Revolutionary Backlash: Women and
Politics in the Early American Republic
"Richard D. Brown likes to take on huge historical problems that span decades and clarify them for us. In this superb book dealing with the conflict over equal rights in antebellum America, he has done it again, and once more we are in his debt."
Gordon S. Wood, author of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning
Radicalism of the American Revolution
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“Richard Brown shows in this erudite, well-argued book that the radical rallying cry of ‘all men are created equal’ helped inspire numerous Americans to fight in politics and the courts to make the ideal of equality a reality.”
Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham
Lincoln and American Slavery
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"Self-Evident Truths is a tribute to a revolutionary ideal of equal rights and to America’s fitful and uneven attempts to realize it in the decades after independence. With elegance and insight, Richard Brown guides us past the privilege of the founders to show us how they and generations of Americans after them took the promise of the Declaration of Independence seriously enough to act on it, if often imperfectly, across the range of religion, ethnicity, gender, age, class, and even race."
Bruce Mann, author of Republic of Debtors:
Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence
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Additional reviews coming soon!
Journal of American History Volume 104, No. 4 (March 2018)
Michal Jan Rozbicki, Saint Louis University
"Self-Evident Truths is a rewarding volume -- carefully written, balanced, and well documented... Brown breaks down his analysis into sections on equality in religion, citizenship, race, gender, class, and wealth—vivid prisms through which readers witness how tensions between principle and reality played out in social and legal praxis."