Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream -- P

<p><b>"Gripping . . . Vibrant . . . A wonderfully absorbing and stimulating book." --Sarah Bakewell, NBCC Award-winning author of <i>How to Live </i>and <i>Humanly Possible</i></b> <p/><b>"[A] rollicking account . . . The book's compulsive readability is a tribute to Moore's skill at cracking open the pre-revolutionary period." --Charles Arrowsmith, <i>The Washington Post</i> <p/>A spirited group biography that explores the origins of the most iconic words in American history, and the remarkable transatlantic context from which they emerged. <p/></b>The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down--and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America. <p/>Peter Moore's <i>Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness </i>tells the true story of what may be the most successful <i>impor