yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Freedom According to the Declaration Of Independence | The Story of Us


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

I'm headed to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia to meet with its librarian Patrick Spiro. He studies documents dating back to the time of the country's founding. What you're looking at here is one of the first printings of the Declaration of Independence.

The first section is the Preamble. And this is where they talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And the idea is that individuals should be free to do these things, and government is constituted to protect those freedoms.

And what the King has done is broken that contract, broken that trust. And so they have to be freed from the King in order to be free to do what they want. Now, can you say that this was the first time a group of people decided that they wanted to be free to do whatever the heck they wanted to do?

Well, I think it's the first time that it was ever written in an official way. But this is not the only version of the Declaration of Independence that survives. The other document I want to show you is this: Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence.

And you can see on the side, there's these notes. Yeah? Once Congress got their hands on this, they started changing words, changing meanings. I think the most notable one is, in that famous phrase, that people are endowed with certain unalienable rights.

Jefferson originally wrote, inherent and inalienable rights. Inherent rights, which Jefferson used several times, means that all people are born with these rights. OK. So if these rights are not inherent, then you're not necessarily born with them?

Only a few people are born with them. And that applied only to white society. White, male society. Yes. Yes.

More Articles

View All
Homeroom with Sal & Rachel Skiffer - Tuesday, June 23
Hi everyone! Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our daily homeroom, which is our way of staying in touch. It started with obviously all the school closures and social distancing with COVID, but now it’s really just evolved into an interesting for…
Diver Discovers a Strange Vehicle in the Detroit River | Drain the Oceans
I’ve lived in this area my entire life. Right on the United States border. Just a half a mile across the river from Detroit. I’ve been a scuba diver and a diving instructor for over 25 years. I was a broke university student and it was the only place I co…
Exploring Super-Remote Caves in Greenland | Best Job Ever
[Music] More people have been to the Moon than some of the places that I’ve been to. I’m here to collect samples of calite that were deposited in caves over thousands and thousands of years. No one has constructed a cave-based climate record for Greenland…
Visually dividing a fraction by a whole number
Let’s see if we can figure out what 2 over 3 divided by 5 is equal to. Pause this video and see if you can figure this out. Well, there’s a couple of ways that we can approach it. We can first do it in a conceptual way, think about it visually, and to do…
Axe Ghost Daily 2024-08-12
Hey, my name’s Thomas. I am playing Ax Ghost; this is a game I’m working on. You can find a demo of Ax Ghost on Steam. Uh, I’m playing the beta version, and I’ll be playing the daily challenge for today. I have the mirror and the centi Beed special weapon…
Making a Bow By Hand | Live Free or Die
So the back of the bow is looking pretty nice, and I’m going to start shaping the bow with the axe. Take it down to one continuous grain that’ll provide the most strength. Hunter gatherer Matt has only caught small squirrels since returning to his desert…