Table Of Contenti
BARACK OBAMA
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BARACK OBAMA
AMERICAN HISTORIAN
Steven Sarson
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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © Steven Sarson, 2018
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President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, 4 August 2015.
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To my students
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction The landscape of our collective dreams 1
A more perfect union 1
The landscape of our collective dreams 4
Barack Obama: American historian 5
Prologue A more perfect union: Barack Obama’s American history 13
God damn America 13
America can change 14
The substance of our common creed 16
The audacity of hope 18
WE HOLD THESE truths 20
What makes us exceptional— what makes us American 23
The arc of the moral universe 25
Where the perfection begins 26
1 Our starting point as Americans: The American colonies 29
Our starting point as Americans 29
In a hall that still stands across the street 32
The spring of 1787 34
Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots 35
Who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and
persecution 36
; 38
A city upon a hill 40
You would have thought I was Cotton Mather 43
We are no longer just a Christian nation 45
Community, democracy, and homespun virtues 46
He lived usefully 48
The first settlers 51
America’s original sin 54
A question that divided the colonies 55
Our starting point as Americans 56
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Contents
2 The substance of our common creed: The Declaration of Independence
and the American Revolution 59
The substance of our common creed 59
Creed 60
A subject of King George 63
In the year of America’s birth 66
Let it be told to the future world 66
From this time forward forever 68
Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke 69
Its roots in eighteenth- century liberal and republican thought 72
What makes us exceptional 74
What makes us American 76
Farmers and scholars 78
Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots 80
All men are created equal 81
An American family 86
Liberty 88
Where the perfection begins 91
The pursuit of happiness 93
3 The foundation of our government: The Constitution and the new nation 95
The foundation of our government 95
Stained by this nation’s original sin 96
Finally made real 97
WE THE PEOPLE 101
A “deliberative democracy” 103
One of the Founders’ central insights 107
Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry 110
A sufficient defense against tyranny 111
The Supreme Court’s role in determining the law 112
Fundamentalist faith 113
The freedom of the apostate 114
Fidelity to our founding principles 115
The context of an ever- changing world 117
A “wall of separation” between church and state 119
Defending organized religion 120
In God We Trust E Pluribus Unum 123
Through the early days of the Union 123
Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists 126
4 A new birth of freedom: Slavery and the Civil War 129
This nation’s original sin 129
A house that was built by slaves 131
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The answer to the slavery question 133
The hope of slaves 134
We’re the slaves who built the White House 139
Any final resolution 141
Government of the people, by the people, for the people 143
The self- imposed gag rule 145
A lawmaker was beaten unconscious on the Senate floor 146
Who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave 148
A house divided against itself 149
What does this say about our democracy? 151
The cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable 152
William Lloyd Garrison 152
Denmark Vesey 153
Frederick Douglass 154
Harriet Tubman 157
John Brown 158
I’M LEFT THEN with Lincoln 160
Power in words 161
We unified a nation and set the captives free 164
5 We Shall Overcome: Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and civil rights 167
. . . 167
The Nation’s Second Founding 169
While the Civil War raged in the background 170
The United States fiercely debated 172
Robert Smalls, came to prominence 174
To build a nation of free and equal citizens 176
To vote here in Selma and much of the South 179
“Separate but equal” 181
How far we’ve come 183
A long line of heroes 184
The students who walked passed angry crowds 186
Dr. King’s mighty cadence 189
The culmination of it all 190
The strength and courage of nonviolence 192
The folks whose names you never heard of 195
As old as our beginnings and as timeless as our hopes 198
For we were born of change 200
We know the march is not yet over 202
6 The chief business of the American people: Property and liberty 205
She touched her finger to a screen and cast her vote 205
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