American Scripture
Making the Declaration of Independence
Pauline Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. It is truly "American Scripture," and Maier tells us how it came to be -- from the Declaration's birth in the hard and tortuous struggle by which Americans arrived at Independence to the ways in which, in the nineteenth century, the document itself became sanctified.
Maier describes the transformation of the Second Continental Congress into a national government, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, and with more authority than the colonists would ever have conceded to the British Parliament; the great difficulty in making the decision for Independence; the influence of Paine's Common Sense,…
Pauline Maier was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1960, was a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics in 1960-61, and took her PhD at Harvard University in 1968. She taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts (Boston), University of Wisconsin, Yale University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where was a William R. Kenan Jr Professor of American History. She was the author of From Resistance to Revolution, The Old Revolutionaries, and The American People: A History (a single-authored text for junior high school), as well as numerous other articles and reviews. She died in 2013.
From Resistance to Revolution
Pauline Maier
The Old Revolutionaries
Pauline Maier
The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States
Introduction by Pauline Maier