A spirited reexamination of the most famous words in American history, and the remarkable international context from which they emerged. Thomas Jefferson never actually penned the phrase for which he is best known. and “The preservation of life, and u0026 liberty, and u0026 the pursuit of happiness and ” was how he originally put it, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with and “the preservation of. and ” In a statement as pithy–and contested–as this, a small deletion speaks volumes. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a daisy chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down–and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like America.Peter Moore’s Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness unmasks the transnational history of this most American of phrases. Before Jefferson, there was the English historian Catharine Macaulay, who wrote in 1768 of the and “Virtue, liberty, and happiness of society. and ” Samuel Johnson used the phrase and “pursuit of happiness and ” in his 1759 novella Rasselas (a book whose working title was and “The Choice of Life and “). Everyone, it seemed, had and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and ” on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution.Includes 16 pages of black-and-white images

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