She lets us hear the voice of the people as revealed in the other "declarations" of 1776: the local resolutionsmost of which have gone unnoticed over the past two centuriesthat explained, advocated, and justified Independence and undergirded Congress's work. In Maier's hands, the Declaration of Independence is brought close to us. Maier describes the transformation of the Second Continental Congress into a national government, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, and with more authority than the colonists would ever have conceded to the British Parliament the great difficulty in making the decision for Independence the influence of Paine's Common Sense, which shifted the terms of debate and the political maneuvers that allowed Congress to make the momentous decision. It is truly "American Scripture," and Maier tells us how it came to befrom the Declaration's birth in the hard and tortuous struggle by which Americans arrived at Independence to the ways in which, in the nineteenth century, the document itself became sanctified. Pauline Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation.
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