Back Matter
Cultivating the Sensations of Freedom
“Dined with 350 Sons of Liberty at the Sign of Liberty Tree in Dorchester,” wrote John Adams in an August 14, 1769, diary entry. “We had two tables laid in the open field by the barn, with between three hundred and four hundred plates, and should have spent a most agreeable day had not the rain made some abatement in our pleasures.”
EXCERPT FROM
FREEDOM
Spring 2023
Mr. Dickinson, the farmer’s brother, and Mr. Reed, the secretary of New Jersey, were there, both cool, reserved, and guarded all day. After dinner was over and the toasts drank, we were diverted with Mr. Balch’s mimicry. We had also the “Liberty Song,” and the whole company joined in the chorus. This is cultivating the sensations of freedom. There was a large collection of good company. Otis and Adams are politic in promoting these festivals, for they tinge the minds of the people, they impregnate them with the sentiments of liberty. They render the people fond of their leaders in the cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.
To the honor of the Sons, I did not see one person intoxicated, or near it.
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Gordon S. Wood
Jefferson’s Declaration and the problem of American identity.
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What novelists can teach neuroscientists about consciousness.
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Apoorva Tadepalli
The Revolution, the Constitution, and the Declaration.
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Lapham’s Revolutionary America
Jill Lepore and Gordon S. Wood
“What’s extraordinary in those speeches that Lincoln gave on the eve of the war,” says Gordon S. Wood in this episode of The World in Time, “is his realization of how diverse America had become. We’ve got Frenchmen, we’ve got Spaniards, we’ve got Germans, we’ve got Irish, we’ve got all these different—Scots. How are we going to hold together? We’re not a nation. Lincoln says, Well, we have an answer to that, and it’s that good old Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal.”
Extracts
On Family: passages and images from the Winter 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
"In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth." —V.S. Pritchett, 1968
"A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it." —Susan Sontag, 1977
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