The Consent of the Governed

"The foundations for the United States' independence were laid long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. The Revolution began quietly in homes and schoolrooms across the colonies in the reading lessons women gave to children. Just as the Protestant revolt originated in a practice of individual reading of the Bible, so the theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America - an attitude that would shape the formation of the United States. Gillian Brown takes us back to the basics to teach us why Americans value the right to individual self-determination above all other values. It all begins with children." "Crucially, Locke linked consent with childhood, and it is his formulation of the child's natural right to consent that was instilled in eighteenth-century Americans as they learned to read through Lockean-style pedagogies and textbooks. Tracing the Lockean legacy through the New England Primer and popular readers, fables, and fairy tales, Brown demonstrates how Locke's emphasis on the liberty - and difficulty - of individual judgment became a received notion in the American colonies."--Jacket.