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About a year ago, Hannah, we made an episode about the Declaration of Independence.

And it had a healthy dose of my enthusiasm for 1776.

The Declaration will be a triumph. I tell you a triumph.

And it had different takes from three scholars on what the document was.

It had the job of justifying one of the most consequential political decisions ever taken.

I refer to the Declaration of Independence as originally written as a secession ordinance.

This was as close to a perfect document on human agency that won whatever fine.

And I love making that episode. I really did.

And since then, the Declaration has found its way into many of our episodes.

Yes, our exploration of that document feels forever unfinished.

And on the cutting room floor of that episode was something our guest, Byron Williams, said.

How the Declaration was exclusionary.

But the ideas in it evolved into the words of Abraham Lincoln, James Baldwin, the poet and activist, Langston Hughes.

As we pass this most recent quarantine 4th of July, I call Byron up to just get a little more on this.

At the time before we start, do you still have like 30 minutes?

I got 31 for you.

Byron Williams is a professor, theologian and host of the show, The Public Morality.

And he has just written the radical Declaration. It's a book of essays on our paradoxical founding document.

So I asked him first how the Declaration had been used to fuel political change.

Lincoln, Reconstruction, Women's Suffrage, Civil Rights, GM Crow, Vietnam, the current moment.

But that's the great thing about that document.

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