Thomas Jefferson Our Founding Fathers’ Government Based on Reason: A New Way of Thinking Self-Evident The words of the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”—are more than a call for freedom. They express a new philosophy, one that changed how people thought about government and truth [...]
Understand Our Founding Fathers A New Way of Seeing the World The Enlightenment was a powerful movement in the 17th and 18th centuries that transformed how people thought about God, nature and what it means to be human. It crossed the Atlantic into the American colonies and deeply shaped the minds of the Founding [...]
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness The phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. These words express the hopes of all people. The author of the Declaration of Independence recognized that these rights, so much a part of the basic nature of people, cannot be [...]
Importance of Supreme Court Justices What’s at stake with a new Supreme Court Justice? What does it mean? What is going to happen? How does any of this affect me? To answer the question of what’s at stake, let’s take a long-ago historical example of how a changed Supreme Court changed the lives of all [...]
Take Our Constitution Quiz I have a short and simple Constitution Quiz – try it out and have fun! Click “Quiz” on the navigation bar above– and let me know what you think. Dave Kluge www.understandtheconstitution.com Author of The People’s Guide to the United States Constitution. The book presents the original texts of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, [...]
Correct Abuses of Constitutional Power Surveys show the majority of Americans have not read or understood the Constitution, yet it is only about 7,000 words, or less than 25 pages. A big reason for this is it was written in what is now 200-plus-year-old language, with lots of difficult legal words. Yet, the Constitution is [...]
