Ideas Uncorked: National Treasure Book Launch

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Join The Hoover Institution in DC for the next session in the Ideas Uncorked monthly happy hour series that brings together preeminent scholars from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the best from California Wine Country.

This is an in-person only series at the Hoover Institution's Washington, DC office.

ABOUT

, PhD, is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, Auslin is the author of the forthcoming history National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America. He also writes The Patowmack Packet, a Substack on Washington, DC, and American History.

His prior books include Asia'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 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. He comments regularly for US and foreign print and broadcast media.

is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a columnist for RealClearPolitics and serves as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship.

From 2019 to 2021, he served as the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior advisor to the secretary of state. Berkowitz is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation; Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War; Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism; and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. In addition, Berkowitz is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions and has written hundreds of articles, essays, and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The inspiring story of the Declaration of Independence—the first to take us from its drafting by Thomas Jefferson to today—charting the many lives of a document that captures the soul of America and has united generations around its defiant ideals, published for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

An award-winning historian, Michael Auslin take us from the boarding house in Philadelphia where Jefferson put quill to paper to the Declaration’s covert signing, dissemination in the doldrums of the revolutionary war, and long, harrowing, and ultimately hallowed afterlife. We follow the parchment as it is hauled out of a soon-to-be-burning Washington in 1814 and see it hidden in a dank cellar, posted in classrooms, recited on village greens, printed on handkerchiefs, and used to sell insurance and bundle coal. An inspiration to both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in the Civil War, it has grown more important for each new generation. While FDR and Churchill celebrated its commitment to freedom from tyranny, the document itself was lowered into a bunker at Fort Knox. After the war, its precious ink fading, it was painstakingly preserved and enshrined.