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I'm Christopher Lighten. This is OpenSource.

We're back two centuries this hour to the source code of the American experiment.

Very particularly, back to John Quincy Adams' caution

about the United States' role in a contentious world.

I'm sitting under a portrait of John Quincy Adams

and he's not smiling here in the Massachusetts Historical Association

but he's a star of this incredible collection of Adams family papers.

Three generations, two presidents among them.

Sarah Martin, you've got the handwritten copy of the famous speech.

It's July 4th, 1821.

Adams' Secretary of State in the Monroe Administration.

Adams' wife has copied out his draft manuscript about the US in the wider world.

It goes,

wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled,

there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

And then Adams adds in his own handwriting, quite different.

But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

There it is.

...