This Week · Liberty · Independence Day

Liberty — what did the founders mean by "liberty"?

For littler ones: What do you think it means to be free?

Liberty is everywhere in July — stamped on coins, carved over doorways, hung from flagpoles. But here's the question worth turning over with your kids this week: what did the founders actually mean by it? When fifty-six men sat down in a hot, shut-windowed room in 1776 and wrote that all men are created equal, what were they reaching for? It was a brave thing to write, and a hard one — several of those men, Jefferson among them, owned enslaved people even as they wrote those words, and it would take other Americans, in later generations, to hold them to the promise. This week's two stories sit on either side of that summer: the room where the words were written, and the old, beloved tale of a bell that rang the news over Philadelphia. Big questions for a small bell. We wonder what your kids will make of it.

This week's stories

American

The Room Where the Words Were Written

A hot Philadelphia summer, the windows shut so no one outside could hear, and a thin red-haired Virginian writing the most famous sentence in American history by candlelight. This is the signing of the Declaration told honestly: the daring of it, and the gap inside it. The men who wrote 'all men are created equal' bought and sold human beings a few blocks away, and most of them knew it was wrong — and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, and Dr. King would later read those same words back to a country that hadn't kept it yet. A clear-eyed way in to what the founders meant, and what they couldn't yet live up to.

American

The Boy Who Rang the Liberty Bell

An old bellman waits all day in a hot steeple, and his grandson waits below by the great closed door, watching for the moment to shout the signal up: 'Ring! Ring!' It's a story Americans have loved for generations — and it is a legend, not history. A writer named George Lippard shaped the tale in 1847, long after that summer, and the bell got the name we know it by, the Liberty Bell, even later, from Americans working to end slavery who chose it as their sign of freedom. We tell it as the cherished tale it is: the long wait, the open door, the bright-eyed boy, and the deep bell rolling the news over the rooftops.

Talk about it

When the founders said 'liberty,' what do you think they were wishing for?
The men who wrote 'all men are created equal' didn't yet treat everyone that way. What do you make of writing down a promise you haven't kept?
If you could ring a bell to tell the whole city one piece of news, what news would it be?

A new question every week.

Listen together in the app — short audio stories for kids 4–10, at bedtime, on the drive, in the drop-off line.

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

Join the family

Get the stories that built America in your inbox

New stories, the weekly Almanac, and family read-aloud picks. No spam — unsubscribe anytime.