This is the John Fugel-Seng podcast.

Happy July 4th.

Happy July 4th.

July 4th, of course, commemorates the day in 1827 that New York City abolished slavery.

July 4th also commemorates of course the date in 1884 that the Statue of Liberty was presented to the United States in Paris.

Right, July 4th is also the date that the second, third, and fifth presidents all died.

And of course, it's also perhaps the most accidentally important day in American history.

And I wouldn't want to celebrate the fourth without speaking to the great Kenneth C. Davis, the New

York Times best-selling author of the America's Hidden History and

don't know much about history books. He's also the author of the best book about

slavery I've read since Roots the Shadow of Liberty. Check out his book Strong Man, which will tell you all about how

dictators rise and fall. You've seen Kenneth C. Davis all over TV and radio and a Ted Ed educator.

We are always thrilled to welcome Mr Davis back to our show.

Happy 4th of July, Kenneth.

Hey John, always a great pleasure to be with you and happy Independence Day to you and everyone else as well. It is the day we are actually

told to go pursue happiness. So I'm all for it.

Yeah, every day of pride too, but some people don't like that much liberty. I want to begin by talking about the declaration itself because I think as Americans it's inherent that we take our liberties for granted

and I think it's easy to forget that the Declaration of Independence as we know it

contains many radically new and profound ideas and I want to ask why

250 odd years later almost 250 years later why should we still view this document as a radical work?

It's a really good and important question, John, and I love, I've been talking about July 4th for a very long time professionally more than 30 years.

As a nation we still don't know much about history unfortunately. We've seen all sorts of stories lately about children in particular

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