Episode Details

We hold these truths to be self-evident — but they were not self-evident. For almost the whole of human history, on nearly every patch of the globe, the opposite was assumed: that men are born unequal, that kings rule by the will of God and answer to no one, that the strong command and the weak obey. King James the First told his Parliament that a king was a god on earth, accountable to none. And then a handful of men on the edge of a wilderness wrote down that all men are created equal, that their rights come from God and not the state, and that no government is legitimate without the consent of the governed — and called it obvious.

Where did that come from? This is the season that answers the question. The ideas of the American Revolution were not invented; they were the crescendo of two thousand years of Western thought — Greek reason, Roman law, Christian conscience — carried down a long line of thinkers and finally tried, on the open ground of America, to its conclusion. Thomas Jefferson said he invented nothing. John Adams said the real revolution happened in the mind, before a shot was fired. This is the story of that revolution in the mind — and of the inheritance the whole nation still lives on.