National Treasure

“Deeply researched and propulsively written, National Treasure follows the Declaration of Independence from its birth in 1776 to today. Michael Auslin has given us much to debate and much to celebrate. Treating our shared American scripture as a set of ideas, a national covenant, and a material artifact that continues to evolve, he has uncovered a history that will inspire, provoke, and delight even readers deeply familiar with our founding vision.”
—Jane Kamensky, President of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
“For the most powerful nation in the world to be founded on a piece of paper is remarkable enough, but for it to continue to inspire the spread of liberty and democracy a quarter of a millennium later—in ways the original signers could never have imagined—is truly extraordinary. Scrupulously researched and beautifully written, this book reads like an adventure story. Michael Auslin’s intimate history of the document that changed the world is scholarship at its best: witty, fascinating, and never more relevant.”
—Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill and The Last King of America
“Even 250 candles on the nation’s birthday cake cannot be as illuminating as Michael Auslin’s fascinating story of the making, and still undiminished resonance, of the world’s most consequential political document. His mind-opening book closes a question that is currently hotly contested. Is ours a creedal nation? Yes! Auslin supplies the exclamation mark.”
—George F. Will, author of American Happiness and Discontents
“The Declaration—both the parchment and its principles—have had an eventful history. Michael Auslin deftly walks us through each chapter, as we have forgotten the document, mangled it, mythologized it, hijacked it, and every once in a while even lived up to it. A nimble, captivating view of the defiant 1,320 words that have knit themselves into every chapter of the last 250 years, only gaining in importance along the way.”
—Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary
“In this fascinating and well-researched book, Michael Auslin weaves the glorious narrative of this document—as a piece of parchment, as a symbol of enduring principles, and as a cultural object—from its inception to our day. It’s a marvelous way to celebrate who we are, and who we should be.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin and The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
“Auslin recounts [this] riveting tale with clarity and verve…. Later generations took the Declaration as an inspiration for their own causes, from temperance to women’s rights and the abolition of slavery… . In the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt tied it directly to the war against fascism, and the Cold War challenged Americans to live up to the Declaration’s principles. Far from seeming anachronistic, the author writes, the document had ‘inspired a new sense of what it meant to be American.‘”
—Wall Street Journal
“One of the best books on American history you will read this year.”
—Washington Examiner
“Auslin describes how Americans came to revere the Declaration…. Much of the boldness of the Declaration’s meaning, and its ability to unite the country, has been constructed retroactively…. By tracing how the document has taken on such monumental status, he provides a history of the country itself.”
—Financial Times
“Auslin’s fine and immensely readable book…tells us the whole story of the Declaration’s journey through the past 250 years—a history of its reception, if you like, but written for the educated general reader, not the specialized scholar—and how our readings of it at various times have both reflected and influenced those times, and yet left the document itself intact and inexhaustible.…The book concludes with the hope that the Declaration… can be a unifying force in a fractious time.”
—Washington Free Beacon

Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Prior to that, he was an associate professor of history at Yale. He wrote National Treasure as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center and an American Heritage Partners Fellow at the Society of the Cincinnati’s American Revolution Institute. He writes a Substack, The Patowmack Packet, on Washington, DC, past and present, and lives in Virginia.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.