The Declaration’s Force - 4 week series

Led by rengade Americophile English Cultural Historian Nicholas Friend

Course will take place four consecutive weeks.

Wednesday, June 24th, July 1st, July 8th and July 15th, 2026 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Admission is by donation and no one will be turned away for lack of funds. We recommend a donation of $35 per person, per course. When purchasing your ticket there is a limit of only one per course - you may bring more than 1 person. Please consider this when choosing your donation amount.

Never before 1776 had such an incendiary political declaration been made. Never since has a political document inspired such a sea-change in the structure of government, or such creative originality in social and cultural expression. Shock waves from the American Revolution that ensued were felt not only in American life and politics, but across the world from France to Haiti as impetus for change.

This summer on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is the perfect time to re-examine its sources, the complex implications of its eloquent language, and its vast influence on cultural and social expression. In art and literature influences from Britain and Europe were complemented by uniquely American and African-American voices in literature, art and architecture.

Wednesday June 24 - The Roots of American Self-Determination

The Declaration of Independence stands on the shoulders of earlier texts. We look at the arguments of John Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ John Dickinson’s ‘Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer’, and Tom Paine’s ‘Common Sense’, which shifted the colonial mindset from reconciliation with the British Crown towards an independent, democratic republic.

Wednesday July 1 - Fine Words

The concise and poetic text of the Declaration of Independence and its influence on the Constitution will be examined. We ask whether its assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ and that there are certain ‘unalienable rights’ such as ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, were, or are, ‘self-evident’.

Wednesday July 8 - Literature For a New Nation

The American Renaissance writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau took the Declaration’s focus on individual liberty and applied it to the mind and the soul. James Fenimore Cooper explored the moral ambiguities of the Revolution and Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne forged a distinctly American cultural identity.

Wednesday July 15 - Art, and Architecture for A New Nation

The Declaration of Independence inspired the patriotic historical realism of John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence as well as new acknowledgements of the power of virgin American landscape in the work of Thomas Cole, the African-American Robert Duncanson and other members of the Hudson River School. Architects turned to the language of the ancient Greeks to express the republic’s new-found democracy.

We hope you will join us for a unique perspective from a renegade Americaphile English cultural historian tempered by a Berkeley- American life partner.

There is a suggested donation of $35 per session toward expenses and refreshments. It is payable in advance through Eventbrite.