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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness : Britain and the American dream / Peter Moore.

by Moore, Peter, 1983- author.

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New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Political science -- Great Britain -- Philosophy -- History -- 18th century.

American Dream.

Philosophers -- Great Britain -- Biography.

United States -- Civilization -- British influences.

United States -- Intellectual life -- 18th century.

Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 18th century.

Great Britain -- History -- 18th century.

United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783.

9780374600594 (hardcover) :

0374600597 hardcover

x, 572 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

First American edition.

Prologue: The Fourth of July -- Life (1740-1759). A new man ; The race ; North star ; Sparks ; The Rambler ; Escape -- Liberty (1762-1768). Scribblers and etchers ; No. 45 ; Infamous ; News-writers ; A seven-year lottery ; Vox populi -- Happiness (1771-1776). A strange distemper ; Those who rush across the sea ; Letters ; Atlanticus ; Common Sense ; Plots -- Epilogue: Crossings.

"The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long 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 the United States of America. Peter Moore's Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the "American dream." Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution" -- Provided by publisher.

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