Historian and former presidential speechwriter Ted Widmer joins Eric Slauter, deputy dean of the Humanities Division and master of the Humanities Collegiate Division associate professor at the University of Chicago, and Lucas Morel, John K. Boardman professor of politics at Washington & Lee University, for a conversation exploring the long afterlife of the Declaration of Independence and its enduring place in American life. Reflecting particularly on our nation’s first half century, they will discuss the Declaration’s ideas and ideals, the people and events that shaped how the first generations of Americans interpreted and sought to embody them, and the document’s continuing influence, from politics and public debate to culture and civic life. The conversation builds on Widmer's new book The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text (Library of America, 2026), which traces the Declaration’s remarkable history and evolving meaning across 250 years. Tom Donnelly, lead scholar at the National Constitution Center, moderates.
This program was presented in partnership with the Library of America, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Participants
Lucas Morel is the John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. His teaching and research interests include American government, political theory, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and race and equality. He is the author of Lincoln and the American Founding, and, most recently, Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln, which he co-authored with Professor Jon White.
Eric Slauter is deputy dean of the humanities and the college at the University of Chicago, where he serves as an associate professor in the Department of English, an associate faculty member in the Divinity School, and serves as the founding director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. He is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution and the forthcoming book The Promises of the Declaration.
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.
Tom Donnelly is lead scholar at the National Constitution Center and a law professor at the University of Richmond. Prior to joining the Center in 2016, he served as counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, as a Climenko Fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and as a law clerk for Judge Thomas Ambro on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Additional Resources
- Ted Widmer, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text
- The Living Declaration Initiative, Library of America
- Interactive Declaration of Independence, National Constitution Center
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