Introducing Pursuit: The Founders’ Guide to Happiness

We the People

National Constitution Center

History, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In our new podcast, Pursuit: The Founders’ Guide to Happiness, Jeffrey Rosen explores the founders’ lives with the historians who know them best. Plus, filmmaker Ken Burns shares his daily practice of self-reflection. The “pursuit of happiness” is one of the most famous phrases in American history. When America’s founders wrote it in the Declaration of Independence, they intended it to mean happiness through lifelong learning and self-improvement. To start our series, Jeffrey Rosen and Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, trace how the meaning of the pursuit of happiness has changed over time. Then, American filmmaker Ken Burns, who has spent his “entire life trying to figure out the United States,” shares how daily self-reflection has given him new perspectives on what the founders faced 250 years ago. Follow Pursuit: The Founders’ Guide to Happiness on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Stay Connected and Learn More Questions or comments about the show? Email us at [email protected] Continue the conversation by following us on social media @ConstitutionCtr  Explore theAmerica at 250 Civic Toolkit Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate Follow, rate, and review wherever you listen Join us for an upcoming live program or watch recordings on YouTube Support our important work: Donate

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friends. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center,
0:07.4	and welcome to We the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate.
0:11.0	The National Constitution Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit, chartered by Congress,
0:15.8	to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.
0:20.2	We've just launched a new 12-part podcast series.
0:23.8	It's called Pursuit, the Founder's Guide to Happiness.
0:26.8	Each episode features conversations with filmmaker Ken Burns and great American historians,
0:32.5	and we explore how the founders understood civic virtue and personal growth as essential to the common good.
0:39.4	Listen to Pursuit, The Founder's Guide to Happiness, on your favorite podcast app.
0:43.7	I am thrilled to share the first episode with you now.
0:53.4	We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,
0:59.0	that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
1:03.0	that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
1:09.0	That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers
1:15.1	from the consent of the governed.
1:18.7	These are just 55 of the 1,320 words in the Declaration of Independence.
1:26.0	And yet, they're the most famous words in American history about what makes us happy.
1:31.3	In this podcast, I'd like to explore with you what the pursuit of happiness meant to the founders,
1:37.3	and how learning about the forgotten meaning of those words changed my life and can change yours.
1:43.3	Hello, friends. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
1:50.4	And this is Pursuit, the Founder's Guide to Happiness.
1:57.7	In his early 20s, Benjamin Franklin recalled in his autobiography,
	...

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