We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

These words from the Declaration of Independence are at once familiar and startling. Where did they come from, and what do they mean to us today? Do we understand them in the same way the Founders did?

Jurists and legal scholars speak of the “living” Constitution, understanding that it must be continually read and reinterpreted in light of our evolving national life. In The Living Declaration, acclaimed historian and former presidential speechwriter Ted Widmer shows that the Declaration of Independence is also very much alive. It remains, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “the electric cord ... that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

Weaving together sixty-eight essential writings by a broad spectrum of American and international figures—radicals and conservatives, revolutionary insurgents and civil rights leaders, presidents and philosophers—The Living Declaration traces the remarkable story of how America’s founding text came to be and how it has shaped democratic aspirations across the globe for more than two centuries. Ranging from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, from Emma Goldman and Huey Long to H. L. Mencken and Ho Chi Minh, and from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hannah Arendt to Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, the voices gathered here are impassioned and often disagree, but they are united in the belief that the Declaration has something crucial to tell us about the American people and the larger struggle for human freedom. “They speak to us,” Widmer writes, “and they talk to each other as well, in a conversation that will never end.”

Ted Widmer is a prize-winning historian who has written or edited a dozen books, including Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, and the two-volume Library of America edition, American Speeches. He writes frequently for The New Yorker, The Guardian, the Boston Globe, and The New York Times, where he helped create the Disunion feature about the Civil War.