In a conversation with SCL Dean Justin Dyer, Dr. Michael Auslin (Hoover Institute) will trace the Declaration’s journey from Thomas Jefferson’s desk in Philadelphia to its current place of honor at the National Archives and explore how 250 years later, its principles continues to inspire Americans and many others around the world.
Join the School of Civic Leadership for the inaugural event in the Cincinnatus Civic Life Series: “How the Declaration of Independence Made America: A Conversation with Michael Auslin.” While the events surrounding the signing of the Declaration of Independence have been celebrated in paintings, dissected in books, and even depicted in a Broadway musical, the story of the Declaration does not end in 1776. For 250 years, Americans have discussed and debated the rights and responsibilities enshrined in the Declaration. In a conversation with SCL Dean Justin Dyer, Dr. Michael Auslin (of the Hoover Institute) will trace the Declaration’s journey from Thomas Jefferson’s desk in Philadelphia to its current place of honor at the National Archives and explore how 250 years later, its principles continues to inspire Americans and many others around the world.
Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian, Auslin is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author ofAsia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific and The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region. He also writes The Patowmack Packet, a Substack on Washington, DC, and American history. He has been a longtime contributor to The Wall Street Journal and his writing appears in other leading publications including the Financial Times, The Spectator, Law & Liberty, and Foreign Policy.
Justin Dyer is the inaugural Dean and Rex W. Tillerson Chair at UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership. He writes and teaches on American political thought, constitutionalism, and jurisprudence, with an emphasis on the philosophical tradition of natural law. He is the author of Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition and Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning and the editor or co-author of several articles, book chapters, and collected volumes. Previously, Dyer was professor of political science at the University of Missouri, where he served as founding director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, a signature academic center for the study of American political thought and history.