Most histories of the American founding celebrate its courage. Lawrence Reed’s new book Born of Ideas does that too, but it does something more useful: it makes the curriculum visible.
His argument is stated plainly in the introduction. The Revolution “did not start with shots fired at Lexington.” What happened there was the result of “a revolution that had been percolating in the hearts and minds of Americans for a generation.” The book is a catalogue of what those minds had been reading, and who had been passing the reading list forward.
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