Rakove, Declaring Rights - A Brief History With Documents; Wills, A Necessary Evil - A History Of American Distrust Of Government

Abstract

In contemporary America, ongoing controversies about rights, as Jack Rakove points out in Declaring Rights, have spurred an interest "in the historical origins of the Bill of Rights." It is hard enough defining or talking about rights, but when we engage in discussions about how rights were conceived of in the eighteenth century, the difficulty is only magnified.