Anniversaries are occasions for reading as much as for fireworks. For the 250th year of American independence, the editors offer a list drawn from two shelves: the primary sources of the American founding and of the long struggle to extend its promise, and the classic works of the conservative tradition that has tried to conserve it. These are our choices, not a canon handed down, and each rewards the reader who goes to the text itself rather than a summary of it.

We begin where the country did. At the 150th anniversary in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge explained to an audience in Philadelphia why the principles of the Declaration could not be improved upon.

“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.”

President Calvin Coolidge, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926

The Founding

  • The Declaration of Independence (1776). Read the grievances as well as the preamble; together they explain what the colonists believed a government owes its people.
  • Common Sense, by Thomas Paine (1776). The pamphlet that turned a quarrel with Parliament into an argument for independence.
  • The Constitution (1787) and the Bill of Rights (1791). Short enough to read in one sitting and worth reading clause by clause.
  • The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay (1787–1788). Begin with Nos. 1, 10, 51 and 78, then read the Anti-Federalist essays of Brutus for the case against ratification.
  • Washington’s Farewell Address (1796). A retiring president’s counsel on union, faction, public credit and permanent foreign alliances.

The Promise Extended

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and Douglass’s address “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852). The most searching indictment of the distance between the Declaration and American practice, by a man who came to see the Constitution as an ally in closing it.
  • Abraham Lincoln’s speeches at Peoria (1854) and Cooper Union (1860), the Gettysburg Address (1863) and the Second Inaugural Address (1865). The founding principles restated for a nation divided against itself.
  • Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington (1901). A memoir of education, work and institution-building after emancipation.
  • Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic” (1910). The Paris address remembered for its tribute to “the man who is actually in the arena.”
  • Calvin Coolidge, address on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926). The finest presidential reflection on what the Declaration means and why it endures.

An Observer from Abroad

  • Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835 and 1840). A French visitor’s account of townships, associations, religion and equality, still unmatched as a portrait of American civic life.

The Conservative Tradition

  • Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke (1790). A founding text of modern conservatism, by a statesman who had defended the American colonists in Parliament.
  • The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek (1944). A warning that central economic planning erodes political freedom.
  • Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard M. Weaver (1948).
  • Witness, by Whittaker Chambers (1952). A former Soviet agent’s account of his break with communism and of the Hiss case.
  • The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk (1953).
  • The Quest for Community, by Robert Nisbet (1953).
  • Crisis of the House Divided, by Harry V. Jaffa (1959). A close reading of the Lincoln–Douglas debates as a contest over the meaning of the Declaration.
  • The Conscience of a Conservative, by Barry Goldwater (1960).
  • Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman (1962).
  • In Defense of Freedom, by Frank S. Meyer (1962). The case for joining traditionalism and libertarianism in a single conservatism.

Historians of the Founding and the Movement

  • The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn (1967).
  • The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, by Gordon S. Wood (1969).
  • The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, by George H. Nash (1976).
  • Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, by Forrest McDonald (1985).

A suggestion for using the list: read one founding document beside a later work, the Declaration with Douglass, The Federalist with Tocqueville, the Farewell Address with Chambers, and ask what each author believed Americans had inherited and what they owed in return.