This year marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As America prepares to celebrate the semiquincentennial on July 4, one of the country's leading democracy scholars will visit Penn State University Park this spring to reflect on the Declaration's meaning today.
Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project, will present the lecture "250 Years of Our Declaration of Independence: Why an Old Text Still Serves Us Now" March 19 at 5 p.m. in the HUB-Robeson Center's Freeman Auditorium.
Allen's talk will draw from her book "Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality," which argues that the Declaration of Independence is as much about political equality as it is about individual liberty and that liberty and equality are both necessary for a healthy democratic culture.The book originated from Allen's experience teaching the Declaration of Independence to night school students in Chicago and trying to make Jefferson's words relevant to their daily lives.
The lecture will also draw on Allen's more recent work on democracy reform. She was co-chair of the Our Common Purpose commission at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which released a report in 2020 outlining dozens of structural and cultural changes needed to strengthen American democracy by the country's 250th birthday this year.
Allen presented a virtual lecture for the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the Our Common Purpose report in 2021. She continued studying and writing about democracy reform in a regular column for The Washington Post and now in The Renovator newsletter on Substack.
