Monday, September 2, 2019
us history :: essays research papers
The Declaration of Independence contains words all Americans take for granted: â€Å"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness†¦Ã¢â‚¬ The founders of the country that would become the United States had to put these words into a written declaration because those ruling them at the time did not recognize those rights. Democracy as we know it today was just beginning to take shape prior to the American Revolutionary War.      Often, the events are presented to students in overly simplistic ways: the colonists simply got mad because they had no parliamentary procedures for influencing the laws that governed them, a concept explained as â€Å"taxation without representation.†England imposed more and more taxes on the colonists, and they had no way to stop the King from doing this to them, so they rebelled. However, the idea that they should have the right to overthrow a government that denied them what we now think of as basic rights was a relatively new one, and not one embraced by all political leaders in Europe at the time.      These ideas began with discoveries in science that revealed that our physical world was governed by predictable rules, by cause and effect (Mills, 1996). At the time, science was viewed as a branch of philosophy, and scientific thinking was gradually applied to philosophy, leading to a new school of thought that came to be known as â€Å"The Enlightenment.†(The Economist, 1999) The idea of democracy wasn’t new. Ancient                                              Rights page 2 Greece had been ruled by a modified form of democracy that gave the right to vote to the upper echelons of male citizens.      The development of modern democracy also had roots in developing economic practice. John Locke, one of prominent thinkers in the Enlightenment movement, put great emphasis on the right to own property. Systems of law that were respected by members of many different countries were necessary so commerce could develop. Without laws regarding ownership and property, those engaging in trade could not be certain that transaction agreements would be honored (The Economist, 1999).      In reports of the events leading up to the American Revolution, the King of England is often depicted as a dictator who pronounced law as he saw fit based on his absolute power. However, the notion of a monarch with absolute power was not the standard for most of European history.
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