How Jefferson’s ‘pursuit of happiness’ phrase came to be
From the time they are schoolchildren, Americans learn what happened after Thomas Jefferson asserted a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. In his stirring intellectual history, Peter Moore focuses not on the “after,” but on the “before,” tracing the broad shifts in thought, years in the making, that enabled Jefferson and his fellow drafters to conceive of human rights in such a groundbreaking and expansive way.
“Contained in that phrase is so much
