Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Steve Sarson, author of The Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States

What inspired you to write this book? 

I first became fascinated by the Declaration of Independence as an undergraduate in the 1980s—its importance in 1776, its legacy since, and how it said so much in so few words. I have long taught the document as part of larger courses, but it was when I started teaching an entire course on it for Master’s students in Lyon from 2014 that I began to appreciate the true depth, range, and subtle ambiguities of its references and meanings. I wondered initially if I could sustain a 20-hour course on the Declaration alone, but immediately found it difficult to do justice to it in 20 hours alone. And, in discussions with students, I began seeing things in it that I’d never seen before. First, the document’s details—how the grievances, for example, signified much more than previously appreciated, including how closely they related to the principles in the preamble. And I also began to see a larger picture of how the document’s argument was fundamentally historical and how that puts new light on everything else in it. It was then that I realized there was a genuinely new interpretation of the Declaration that warranted a book on the subject.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

We’re used to a Declaration that we’ve inherited from America’s great reformers, one that stresses its words on equality and natural rights and argues that it thus represented a break with the past. The main thing to learn, then, is that the original Declaration was in fact based on history interpreted according to its authors’ understandings of the laws of nature and God. And once we see the Declaration as historical, the rest of it takes on new meanings. The ideas in the preamble, for example, about equality, unalienable rights, government by consent, the right to revolution, were not presented as new abstract concepts but as historical facts; the statement in the conclusion about “our emigration and settlement here” is not mere invention or hyperbole but a source of American historical identity; and the grievances highlighted specific violations of the colonists’ inherent natural rights, inherited English rights, and acquired American rights. On the other hand, it also becomes apparent that contemporary understandings of the “Course of human events” combined with natural and sacred law, especially the first law of self-preservation, helps us understand such apparent contradictions as the continuation of slavery and westward expansion at the expense of Native Americans.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

It’s often said that there’s little or nothing new to learn about the Declaration, but through teaching and writing the book I’ve learned never to be surprised by being surprised by it—there’s always something new to discover. I’ll give the most recent example, something that came up in class this semester (Fall 2025) after I’d submitted the book and so couldn’t include it. A student asked me why the Declaration didn’t mention the king by the title of “George III”—something that’s obvious when you see it, but I’d never noticed it before. Now, I’d argued in the book that the Declaration’s principles were not anti-monarchical and one sign of that was that it directed its accusations specifically against “the present king of Great Britain” rather than railing against monarchy in general. I still believe that the Declaration’s principles didn’t militate against monarchy, as they were based on Lockean history and philosophy that validated kingship by consent. But the fact that the Declaration did not name “George III” (and the English Bill of Rights did name “James II”) certainly complicates that argument, and so maybe the Declaration leaned a little more toward republicanism than I argued in the book.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

There are many, but I think my favorite concerns the founders’ appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” in the Declaration’s conclusion. And I think this apparently sudden and curious religious turn derives from something John Locke wrote about Jephthah from the Book of Judges. Locke had asked “Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or Legislative act contrary to their Trust,” given that “ill-affected and factious Men” may unjustly turn a people against their rulers. He answered that “The People shall be Judge, for who shall be Judge whether his Trustee or Deputy acts well … but he who deputes him…?” Yet people must then look to God to guard against “ill-affected and factious Men,” for “God in heaven is judge. He alone, it is true, is judge of the right.” So, “every man is judge for himself … whether another hath put himself into a state of war with him” but also must then “appeal to the supreme judge, as Jephtha did.” Far from only looking to the future to justify their revolution, then, the founders thus looked to an Old Testament story from almost 3,000 years in the past.

What’s next? 

Something I’ve been thinking about for many years is the Glorious Revolution as a defining moment in British-American Atlantic history, and I alluded to it in my British America book and in The Course of Human Events. Both sides in the American Revolution called on the precedent of the Glorious Revolution, yet that revolution had worked out differently in Britain and the colonies, and Britons and American had very different memories of it by the 1760s. In Britain, 1688 and its aftermath created a sovereignty of the crown-in-parliament that shaped assertions of parliamentary power that led Americans to independence because, for Americans, the same Revolution had restored relative autonomy to the colonies under the local assemblies whose rights the British parliament eventually usurped. And the crown-in-parliament system still prevails in Britain today, while in the colonies the executive and legislative branches of government remained and still remain separate—there was no principle of co-ordination and no governors-in-the-assemblies in the American colonies. The colonies thus retained a pre-Glorious Revolution kind of politics that was in turn reflected in the state constitutions and the US federal Constitution. So, the differing historical legacies and memories of the Glorious Revolution help explain not only the American Revolution but its aftermath and the differences between American and British politics today. 1688-89 and what followed from it were therefore help explain when Britons and Americans began diverging from each and developing their own political systems, cultures, and identities.