Self-Evident Truths

Richard D. Brown is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. His previous books include Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865;The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in Early America, 1650-1870; and the coauthored microhistory The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America.

Self- Evident Truths is the winner of the 2018 New England Historical Association (NEHA) book awardFinalist for the Sally and Morris Lasky Prize, established by the Center for Political History at Lebanon Valley College for the best book in American political history published in 2017.  "In Self-Evident Truths, Richard D. Brown offers a lucid, profound, original, probing, and often moving examination of the elusive and conflicting pursuits of equality in the American past and present." - Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History“Richard Brown shows in this erudite, well-argued book that the radical rallying cry of ‘all men are created equal’ helped inspire numerous Americans to fight in politics and the courts to make the ideal of equality a reality.”—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery"Richard D. Brown likes to take on huge historical problems that span decades and clarify them for us. In this superb book dealing with the conflict over equal rights in antebellum America, he has done it again, and once more we are in his debt."—Gordon S. Wood, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Radicalism of the American Revolution"Self-Evident Truths is a tribute to a revolutionary ideal of equal rights and to America’s fitful and uneven attempts to realize it in the decades after independence.  With elegance and insight, Richard Brown guides us past the privilege of the founders to show us how they and generations of Americans after them took the promise of the Declaration of Independence seriously enough to act on it, if often imperfectly, across the range of religion, ethnicity, gender, age, class, and even race."—Bruce Mann, author of Republic of Debtors:  Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence"In a broad-ranging , deeply researched, and marvelously lucid study,  master historian Richard Brown explores the extraordinarily contested nature of the debate over equality from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Brown’s fascinating book could not be more timely or revealing."—Rosemarie Zagarri, author of Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic