Rocky Mountain Voice

Tag: American history

Hancock: July 4 is a call to fulfill, not destroy
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Hancock: July 4 is a call to fulfill, not destroy

By Michael A. Hancock | Commentary, Substack Rediscovering Frederick Douglass’s Real Message Every year around this time, we dust off the words of Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", and parade them around like fireworks—bright, dramatic, and quickly forgotten. In recent years, Douglass has been appropriated into the modern progressive narrative, a voice supposedly echoing today’s claims that America was founded as a white supremacist project, rooted not in liberty but in racial hierarchy. That’s the popular takeaway. But that’s not Douglass’s message. Not even close. Douglass’s words, when read in full, don’t damn the Constitution or the founding ideals—they uphold them. He doesn't condemn the Declaration of Independence as a fr...
Beezley: July 4, 1776 was one perfect moment—for liberty and for mankind
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Beezley: July 4, 1776 was one perfect moment—for liberty and for mankind

By Don Beezley | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice After thousands of years of struggle through oppression and tyranny, there was one perfect moment in human history on a hot, summer day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: July 4, 1776. On that date the Second American Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of the thirteen United States of America–the American Declaration of Independence.  The crowning achievement of the Enlightenment in a one-page document. The Declaration of Independence represents the one moment in history when we got it right. One perfect moment derived from a morally perfect vision. The words on that parchment may fade with time, but its immortal ideas amplify and reverberate through the annals of time: We hold these truths to be sel...
Krannawitter: Without mutual civic trust, there would have been no American Founding
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Krannawitter: Without mutual civic trust, there would have been no American Founding

THOMAS L. KRANNAWITTER, PH.D. | Liberty Lyceum The Signers of the Declaration of Independence concluded with a famous and solemn pledge—their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. This was no small matter. What they were calling “revolution” was, from the British point of view, treason against the Crown and punishable by death. Yet, the Signers stood strong and launched the greatest experiment in freedom the world has witnessed, a movement held together by a powerful kind of social and political glue: Trust. The pledge offered by the Signers in the Summer of 1776 was not a promise to God, nor to fellow citizens. The pledge they made was to each other. They knew, every one of them, that if some broke the trust when the going got tough—and the going was about to get very tough!—others wou...