Declaration Of Independence DBQ Essay

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Pages: 4

The late 18th century was a momentous time and full of change. Many superpowers of the world were changing and encountering forces that would either enforce a good future, or ruin their country for decades to come. A great example of this the mass People’s Revolutions across the world. Major superpowers, such as Great Britain and France, faced many changes that would affect their place on the world stage for the next hundred years. Primary documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the French declarations provide a view into the minds of revolutionaries, and normal peasants alike, as well as the change they strived for. Some of these documents managed to achieve what they were intended for, others allowed loopholes to be created …show more content…
The Declaration of Independence was a formal declaration of the creation of the United States of America and severing all ties with the crown, as a colony. One can easily tell the yearning of the American people to become free from British colonization and the bring the moral rights of man and reason back to the government, by reading this document. Jefferson states repeatedly that the British style of governing the colonies was ineffective when it came to the rights of the people. Britain ran their colonies out of London, rather than out of a local capital, and cannibalized off of the resources and people of that colony (the British would continue to run their empire this way until its disbandment in the 1960s). The colonists saw this as barbaric and inhumane and had decided they had enough of their rights being infringed. To the colonists, it seemed that all the British saw in them was either political exiles or workers who were to be loyal to the crown to a fault. Jefferson emphasizes that this is not the case and famously states, “… all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The British were infringing on these unalienable rights, and it was the colonists right to take matters into their own hands. The Declaration of Independence was successful in gaining …show more content…
They take the reader on a tour of the mind of the writer, who is representing the people of his country/state. Both documents were groundbreaking and changed the course of history for decades to come. However, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen did not affect the future for the better. It was a vague list of rules that were easy to get around, unlike the Declaration of Independence which was an inspirational speech which unified the American colonies as a National State rather than a British colony. Depending on who one asks, Napoleon could be right; history could be a series of lies, decided upon by the hierarchy of society. However, documents like these may support other conclusions that may counter commonly known and accepted events in history, which can fix these “lies” that Napoleon speaks