You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Ben Franklin's world is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

Later on in the founding period, James Madison, comes to focus more on the refinement of public opinion.

And he says that the ultimate authority is opinion, and that through education and

new media technologies like the broadside press, a group of enlightened journalists that he called the literati could educate the people with pieces like the Federalist Papers, which people would read in newspapers and reason would slowly diffuse across the land.

That puts less emphasis on resisting bread and circuses and parading around in Togas and more faith in a representative republic. Hello and welcome to episode 394 of Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and

events of our early American past

have shaped the present day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

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. What did Thomas Jefferson and the members of the Second Continental Congress mean by the pursuit of happiness?

And why is pursuing happiness so important that Jefferson and his fellow founding fathers included

in the Declaration of Independence's most powerful statement of the new United

States ideals. Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, and a law professor at George Washington University Law School,

joins us to investigate and answer these questions with details from his book, The Pursuit of Happiness.

How classical writers on Virtue inspired the lives of the founders and defined America.

Now during our pursuit of understanding about the pursuit of happiness, Jeff reveals the subject of moral

philosophy and the founding generation's interest in this subject.

How the ideas of Greek, Roman, and Enlightenment moral philosophers

shape the founders understanding of virtue,

happiness, and the characteristics of a virtuous citizenry.

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