July 3rd, 2025.

And on July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence,

declaring, 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. For all the fact that the congressman got around

the sticky little problem of black and indigenous

enslavement by defining men as white men,

and for all that it never crossed their minds

that women might also have rights,

the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a

small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be

forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent

declared that no man was born better than any other. America was founded

on the radical idea that all men are created equal. What the founders declared self-evident

was not so clear 87 years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation

in which African Americans, indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish were locked

into a lower status than white Americans. In that era, equality had become a proposition rather than self-evident.

Four score and seven years ago, Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, our fathers brought forth

on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was testing whether that nation,

or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

It did, of course.

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