Posts Tagged ‘Independence’
Happy 250th Birthday America!
Two and one-half centuries ago, a provincial people on the edge of a vast continent declared something astonishingly radical: that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. These brave patriots – farmers, merchants, frontiersmen, bankers – did not merely protest taxation or quarrel with imperial policy. They announced to the world…
Read MoreThe Homestead: Keeping Texas Texan
The first generations of Texans understood this perfectly well: Travis’s famous letter from the Alamo addresses itself to “All Americans in the World,” and the Texas Declaration of Independence asserts that the Texans are making revolution “that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in…
Read MoreWould You Be Brave Enough to Sign Your Name to the Declaration of Independence?
Portrait of John Bernard Hancock Courtesy of History on the Net When was the last time you signed a petition or a letter of support or clicked a thumbs up on an online message? Did you want a street light at the end of your block, or want the City Council to approve a greenbelt?…
Read MorePatrick Henry and the Bill of Rights
This portrait of Patrick Henry (Catalog Number INDE14066) was executed by an unidentified arist before 1878. The portrait, a copy of Thomas Sully’s 1815 protrayal of Henry (now at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) was acquired by the City of Philadelphia between late 1876 and early 1878. Patrick Henry proclaiming “Give Me Liberty…
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