Happiness: The Goal of Life and Government The word “happiness” held deep meaning for America’s Founding Fathers. To them, happiness was not a fleeting feeling or momentary pleasure. It meant living a life of virtue, moral excellence, and liberty within a well‑ordered community. They believed the chief aim of both the individual and the government [...]

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 [...]