Who has the right to rule, and where does that right come from?
Every government in history has had to answer this question, and they have answered it in very different ways. This chapter looks at the kinds of government the GED test asks about, then at the ideas the American founders used to answer the question for themselves. Those ideas are called the principles of American constitutional democracy. They make up a large share of the civics questions on the test, and every later chapter of this course comes back to them.
- The oldest question in politics
- Kinds of government
- Older roots: Athens, Rome, England, and the Haudenosaunee
- The thinkers: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau
- Reading the Declaration of Independence
- Who was left out, and how they used the same words
- The principles, side by side
- Words to know
- How the test asks it: 12 questions
- Talk it over
Take this page slowly, one part at a time. It is fine to stop after any part and come back later. Each part ends with a short box called "Hold on to this." Those boxes are the ideas to carry into the test.
The oldest question in politics
A government is the group of people and institutions that make and enforce the rules for a society. It can collect taxes, arrest people, send soldiers to war, and decide what is legal. That is a great deal of power over other people's lives. So people have always asked: what gives these particular people the right to hold that power?
For most of human history, the answers were some version of these:
- Birth. The ruler is the child of the last ruler. Power passes down through a family.
- God. The ruler was chosen by God, or is a god, so obeying the ruler is obeying God. In Europe this was called the "divine right of kings."
- Force. The ruler won a war, or took power with an army, and no one is strong enough to remove him.
In all three answers, the people being ruled have no say. They are expected to obey.
Over several hundred years, a different answer grew up, mostly in England and then in its American colonies. It said that the right to rule comes from the people themselves. A government is legitimate only if the people it governs have agreed to it. (Legitimate means rightful: accepted as having a proper claim to power.) That answer is the foundation of the American system, and this chapter follows where it came from.
Kinds of government
The GED test expects you to know the main types of government and to recognize them from a short description. The key question for each one is: who holds power, and how did they get it?
| Type | Who holds power | An example |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute monarchy | One ruler, a king or queen, who inherits the throne and whose power has no legal limits. | France under Louis XIV in the 1600s; Saudi Arabia today. |
| Constitutional monarchy | A king or queen inherits the throne, but a constitution limits the monarch's power, and elected officials run the government. The monarch's role is mostly ceremonial. | The United Kingdom, Spain, Japan. |
| Dictatorship | One person, or a small group, who took power and rules without the consent of the people, often by force. | Many military governments of the twentieth century. |
| Totalitarian state | A dictatorship that tries to control every part of life: work, school, religion, the news, even what people say at home. | Nazi Germany; the Soviet Union under Stalin; North Korea. |
| Oligarchy | A small group, usually the richest or most powerful families. The word comes from the Greek for "rule by the few." | Some ancient Greek cities; the term is also used today for countries where a handful of very wealthy people control the government. |
| Theocracy | Religious leaders, who rule in the name of God or according to religious law. | Iran since 1979; Vatican City. |
| Direct democracy | The citizens themselves, who vote directly on laws and decisions. | Ancient Athens; town meetings in some New England towns; ballot questions that voters decide on Election Day. |
| Representative democracy (also called a republic) | Representatives whom the citizens elect to make laws for them. | The United States; most democracies today. |
Think of a union local. When the whole membership meets and votes on whether to accept a contract, every member decides directly. That is like a direct democracy.
Most of the local's business, though, is handled by officers and an executive board that the members elect. The members do not vote on every decision; they choose the people who will decide, and they can vote them out at the next election. That is like a representative democracy.
A country of millions cannot hold a meeting of everyone every week, which is why most democracies are representative.
Two kinds of representative democracy
The test also asks about two ways a representative democracy can be organized. The difference is how the head of the government is chosen.
Presidential democracy. The voters elect the president separately from the legislature. The president heads the executive branch, serves a fixed term, and cannot be removed simply because the legislature disagrees with him or her. The United States, Mexico, and Brazil are presidential democracies.
Parliamentary democracy. The voters elect the legislature, called a parliament. The party or group of parties with the most seats in parliament then chooses the head of government, called the prime minister. The prime minister stays in office only as long as he or she keeps the support of a majority in parliament. The United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Germany are parliamentary democracies.
One more word you may see is anarchy, which means the absence of any government at all.
Drills for this part: II.01 Kinds of government: name it from a description · II.02 Direct or representative democracy; presidential or parliamentary. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.
Older roots: Athens, Rome, England, and the Haudenosaunee
The founders of the United States did not invent their ideas from nothing. They borrowed from older governments and older documents, and the test sometimes asks about these roots.
Athens: the first democracy
About 2,500 years ago, the Greek city of Athens created a direct democracy. Citizens met in a large assembly and voted on laws and on war and peace themselves. The word democracy comes from Greek words meaning "rule by the people." But in Athens, "the people" meant only free adult men whose parents were Athenian. Women, enslaved people, and foreigners living in the city could not vote. Most of the people living in Athens had no say.
Rome: the republic
Ancient Rome, for several centuries before it was ruled by emperors, was a republic. Citizens elected officials to govern for them, and a council called the Senate advised them. The word republic comes from the Latin res publica, meaning "the public thing": the idea that the government belongs to the public, not to one ruler. The American founders admired the Roman republic, and they named their own upper house the Senate.
England: limiting the king
In 1215, a group of powerful English nobles forced King John to agree to a document called the Magna Carta, Latin for "Great Charter." Its most famous promise is this:
"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions… except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."
In plain words: The king cannot arrest people or take their property just because he wants to. He must follow the law, and people have the right to be judged by their equals. At first these promises protected mainly the nobles. But the idea inside them grew: even the king is under the law. That idea is called the rule of law, and you can hear it later in the right to a jury trial and to due process.
In 1689, after years of conflict between English kings and Parliament, Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights. It said the monarch could not raise taxes or keep an army in peacetime without Parliament's consent. It protected the right to petition the government. And it said that "excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." A century later, those same words went almost unchanged into the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The colonies: governing by agreement
In 1620, before they left their ship, the Mayflower, the passengers who settled Plymouth in Massachusetts signed an agreement. In it they promised to form a "civil body politic" (a community with a government) and to make and obey "just and equal laws." The Mayflower Compact is often taught as an early example of people creating a government by their own agreement. Over the next 150 years, the colonies also elected their own assemblies, and colonists grew used to making many of their own laws.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy
In what is now upstate New York, five nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, had joined in a confederacy long before Europeans arrived. A sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined in the 1700s. The English called them the Iroquois; they call themselves the Haudenosaunee, "the people of the longhouse." Their Great Law of Peace united separate nations under a shared council while each nation kept control of its own affairs, and clan mothers chose, and could remove, the chiefs. Benjamin Franklin and other colonial leaders knew the Confederacy well. Historians debate how much it shaped the U.S. Constitution. In 1988 Congress passed a resolution acknowledging "the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations to the development of the United States Constitution."
Drills for this part: II.05 Which founding document?. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.
The thinkers: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau
In the 1600s and 1700s, a movement of European writers argued that human reason, rather than tradition or religious authority, should guide how society is organized. This movement is called the Enlightenment. Four of its writers matter most for the GED test. Each one asked the same question: why should people accept a government at all?
To answer it, they imagined people living in what they called the state of nature: life with no government, no police, no courts, and no laws. What would life be like? And why would people choose to leave it?
Thomas Hobbes (England, 1588–1679)
Hobbes lived through a bloody civil war in England, and it shaped his answer. In his book Leviathan (1651), he wrote that without government, people would fight constantly over everything, and life would be, in his most famous words, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape that, people agree to hand their power to a strong ruler who will keep order. In return for safety, they give up the right to rebel. Hobbes's idea is a kind of social contract: an agreement between the people and their government. But in his version, the ruler gets nearly all the power.
John Locke (England, 1632–1704)
Locke is the thinker whose ideas are closest to the Declaration of Independence. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), he argued that every person is born with natural rights: rights you have simply because you are human, which no government gives you. He named them as life, liberty, and property. (By "property" he meant, in his words, people's "lives, liberties and estates," so the word covered more than land and money.)
People form a government, Locke said, to protect those rights better than they could alone. That is his version of the social contract. The government's power comes from the consent of the governed, meaning the agreement of the people. And here is the part that mattered most in 1776: if a government stops protecting people's rights and starts attacking them, it has broken the contract, and the people have the right to replace it.
Baron de Montesquieu (France, 1689–1755)
In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu argued that liberty is safest when the powers of government are divided: one group makes the laws, another carries them out, and a third judges cases. If one person or group holds all three, he warned, there can be no liberty. This idea is called the separation of powers. It became the design of the Constitution's three branches, which is the subject of Chapter 5.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva and France, 1712–1778)
Rousseau's book The Social Contract (1762) opens: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." He argued that the only rightful government is one based on the will of the people as a whole, and that the people, not a king, hold the final power in a nation. The idea that the final power belongs to the people is called popular sovereignty. (Sovereignty means supreme power; popular here means "of the people.")
| Thinker | Main idea | Key words for the test |
|---|---|---|
| Hobbes | Without government, life is war. People give power to a strong ruler for safety. | state of nature, social contract, strong ruler |
| Locke | People have natural rights. Government exists to protect them, by consent, and can be replaced if it fails. | natural rights, life, liberty, property, consent of the governed |
| Montesquieu | Divide government's powers so no one holds them all. | separation of powers |
| Rousseau | The final power belongs to the people as a whole. | popular sovereignty, general will |
Drills for this part: II.03 Match the thinker to the idea. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.
Reading the Declaration of Independence
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft, and a committee and then the whole Congress revised it. The Declaration has four parts:
- An introduction saying that when a people separate from their government, they should explain why.
- A statement of beliefs about rights and government. This is the most famous part, and the part the test quotes most.
- A long list of complaints, called grievances, against King George III.
- A conclusion declaring the colonies "Free and Independent States."
Here is the statement of beliefs, broken into its pieces. Read each piece, then the plain words under it.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
In plain words: We believe these things are so obviously true that they need no proof. ("Self-evident" means obvious without proof.) All people are born equal. God gave them rights that can never be taken away. ("Endowed" means given; "unalienable" means impossible to take away or give up.) Among those rights are life, freedom, and the chance to seek happiness. This is Locke's idea of natural rights. Notice that Jefferson changed Locke's "property" to "the pursuit of Happiness."
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
In plain words: People create governments in order to protect these rights. ("Instituted" means set up.) A government's rightful power comes from the agreement of the people it governs. This is the social contract and the consent of the governed.
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…"
In plain words: When a government works against these purposes, the people have the right to change it or get rid of it, and to set up a new one. ("These ends" means these purposes: protecting rights.) This is Locke's right to replace a government that breaks the contract, and it rests on popular sovereignty: the final power belongs to the people.
The grievances: the evidence
The long list of complaints is the Declaration's evidence. Having said that a government which attacks people's rights may be replaced, the Declaration then tries to prove that the king had done exactly that. Here are three of the twenty-seven grievances:
"For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent…
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury…
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures."
In plain words: The king taxed us without our agreement, took away our right to a jury trial in many cases, and kept soldiers among us in peacetime without our legislatures' permission. Notice that these are the same protections the English Bill of Rights had promised English people in 1689. The colonists were arguing that they were being denied rights that English people already had.
On the GED test, if a question asks why the Declaration includes the list of grievances, the answer is that it gives the evidence that the king had broken the social contract, which justified independence.
Drills for this part: II.06 Reading the Declaration: which part is this?. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.
Who was left out, and how they used the same words
"All men are created equal" was a powerful claim. It was also not true of the country that made it. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words, enslaved more than a hundred people at the time he wrote them, and more than six hundred over the course of his life. In 1776 about one in five people in the thirteen colonies was enslaved. Jefferson's first draft blamed the king for the slave trade; Congress removed that passage. Women could not vote and in most colonies a married woman could not own property in her own name. And one of the grievances accused the king of stirring up "the merciless Indian Savages" against the colonists, a phrase that shows how the Declaration's writers saw the Native nations whose land the colonies were taking.
So who counted as "the governed" whose consent mattered? In 1776, mostly white men who owned property.
But the words themselves did not say "white men who own property." They said "all men," and they said the rights were "unalienable." For the next two and a half centuries, people who had been left out took those words and demanded that the country live up to them. Two examples appear often on the GED test.
Seneca Falls, 1848
In 1848, about three hundred people met in Seneca Falls, New York, at the first women's rights convention in the United States. They issued a document called the Declaration of Sentiments, written mainly by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It copied the form of the Declaration of Independence on purpose:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…"
In plain words: By adding two words, "and women," the writers argued that women had the same natural rights the Declaration of Independence had promised, and then they listed the ways men had denied those rights to women, just as 1776 had listed the king's wrongs. Women won the national right to vote in 1920, with the Nineteenth Amendment (Chapter 10).
Frederick Douglass, 1852
Frederick Douglass had escaped from slavery and become one of the most famous speakers in the country. In 1852, in Rochester, New York, he was invited to give a Fourth of July speech. He asked his mostly white audience:
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."
In plain words: For an enslaved person, the holiday that celebrates freedom shows more clearly than any other day how unjustly he is treated. Douglass did not reject the Declaration. Later in the same speech he praised its principles. His point was that the country was betraying its own founding words.
A little over a century later, Martin Luther King Jr. made the same kind of argument in his 1963 speech at the March on Washington, calling the Declaration and the Constitution a promise that the country had not kept for Black Americans. Chapters 8 and 9 of this course follow that struggle.
The principles, side by side
The GED test names a set of principles that shaped the American system of government, and it expects you to recognize each one from a description or a quotation. Here are the ones from this chapter, with the ones later chapters explain.
| Principle | What it means | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Natural rights | Every person is born with rights, such as life and liberty, that no government gives and no government may take away. | Locke; the Declaration: "unalienable Rights" |
| Social contract | People agree to accept a government, and in return the government protects their rights. | Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau; the Mayflower Compact |
| Consent of the governed | A government's rightful power comes from the agreement of the people it governs. | The Declaration: "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" |
| Popular sovereignty | The final, supreme power in a nation belongs to the people. | Rousseau; the Constitution's first words: "We the People" |
| Rule of law | Everyone, including the people who govern, must obey the law. No one is above it. | Magna Carta |
| Constitutionalism (limited government) | The government's powers are written down and limited by a constitution. It may do only what the constitution allows. | The English Bill of Rights; the U.S. Constitution |
| Majority rule and minority rights | Decisions are made by majority vote, but the majority may not take away the basic rights of those who lose the vote. | The Bill of Rights (Chapter 7) |
| Separation of powers | Government's powers are divided among separate branches. | Montesquieu; the three branches (Chapter 5) |
| Checks and balances | Each branch has ways to limit the others. | The veto, Senate approval, judicial review (Chapter 5) |
| Federalism | Power is divided between the national government and the states. | Chapter 6 |
Pairs that are easy to mix up
Consent of the governed and popular sovereignty are close relatives. Consent of the governed is about where a government's right to rule comes from: the people's agreement. Popular sovereignty is about who holds the final power: the people. If a question quotes "We the People," think popular sovereignty. If it quotes "consent of the governed," the answer is usually that phrase itself.
Popular sovereignty and majority rule are different. Popular sovereignty says the people as a whole hold the final power. Majority rule is a method for making decisions: the side with more votes wins. And in the American system, majority rule has a limit, which is minority rights. Suppose a town voted, 60 to 40, to ban a small religious group from meeting. The majority won the vote, but the ban would violate the minority's freedom of religion, which the Constitution protects no matter how the vote goes.
Rule of law and constitutionalism are also close. Rule of law says everyone, leaders included, must obey the law. Constitutionalism says the government itself is limited to the powers written in its constitution.
Drills for this part: II.04 Name the principle from an example. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.
Before the test: five things to know from Chapter 1
- Kinds of government: Ask who holds power and how they got it. Direct democracy: the people vote on laws. Representative democracy: the people elect lawmakers. Presidential: the president is elected separately. Parliamentary: the legislature picks the prime minister.
- Locke: Natural rights to life, liberty, and property; government by consent; the right to replace a government that attacks those rights.
- The Declaration's key sentence: Governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed."
- Older roots: Magna Carta (1215) put the king under the law. The English Bill of Rights (1689) limited the monarch and banned "cruel and unusual punishments."
- The promise and the practice: The Declaration's "all men are created equal" left out enslaved people, women, and Native Americans, and those left out used its words to demand their rights, as at Seneca Falls in 1848.
Words to know
- Government
- The people and institutions that make and enforce the rules for a society.
- Legitimate
- Rightful; accepted as having a proper claim to power.
- Monarchy
- Government by a king or queen who inherits the throne. Absolute if the monarch's power has no limits; constitutional if a constitution limits it.
- Dictatorship
- Rule by one person or a small group who holds power without the people's consent, often by force.
- Totalitarian
- Describes a government that tries to control every part of people's lives.
- Oligarchy
- Rule by a small group, usually the wealthiest or most powerful.
- Theocracy
- Rule by religious leaders or according to religious law.
- Direct democracy
- Citizens vote on laws and decisions themselves.
- Representative democracy, or republic
- Citizens elect representatives to make laws for them.
- Parliamentary democracy
- The elected legislature, or parliament, chooses the head of government, the prime minister.
- Presidential democracy
- Voters elect the president separately from the legislature, for a fixed term.
- Enlightenment
- A movement of the 1600s and 1700s that argued reason should guide how society is organized.
- State of nature
- The imagined condition of people living with no government at all.
- Natural rights
- Rights every person has from birth, which no government gives.
- Unalienable
- Impossible to take away or give up. (Also spelled "inalienable.")
- Social contract
- The agreement by which people accept a government in return for its protection of their rights.
- Consent of the governed
- The agreement of the people a government rules, which gives it the right to rule.
- Popular sovereignty
- The principle that the final power in a nation belongs to the people.
- Rule of law
- The principle that everyone, including leaders, must obey the law.
- Constitutionalism
- The principle that government's powers are set out and limited by a constitution.
- Grievance
- A formal complaint about a wrong.
Twelve questions in the test's own style
Answer all twelve, then press "Check my answers." Each question will be marked. Then open the key: it explains every answer and names the wrong answer that most often tempts people.
1.In a certain country, a queen inherits the throne from her father. An elected parliament makes the laws, and the queen's duties are mostly ceremonial. What type of government does this country have?
2.In some small towns in New England, all registered voters gather once a year at a town meeting and vote on the town's budget and rules themselves. This is an example of
3.In the United Kingdom, voters elect members of Parliament. The leader of the party with the most seats becomes prime minister and must keep the support of a majority in Parliament to stay in office. Which type of government does this describe?
4.The Declaration of Independence says that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." Which principle does this phrase express?
5.John Locke wrote that people form governments to protect their "lives, liberties and estates." Which phrase in the Declaration of Independence most closely echoes this idea?
6.Thomas Hobbes argued that people should give their power to a strong ruler in return for safety, and should not rebel. With which statement would John Locke most likely have agreed, and Hobbes disagreed?
7.Match each description to the principle it describes. Choose from each drop-down menu. Each principle is used once.
8.Read this passage from the Magna Carta of 1215.
"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions… except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."
Which principle of American government can be traced to this passage?
9.The English Bill of Rights of 1689 said that "excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." These words later appeared almost unchanged in
10.Read this passage from the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…"
Why did the writers model their document on the Declaration of Independence?
11.Most of the Declaration of Independence is a long list of complaints against King George III, such as "For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent." What is the main purpose of this list?
12.The voters of a town approve a rule, 60 percent to 40 percent, banning a small religious group from holding services in the town. Why would this rule conflict with American constitutional principles?
The key
1. B. The queen inherits the throne, so it is a monarchy. But elected lawmakers govern and her role is ceremonial, so her power is limited. That is a constitutional monarchy.
The tempting wrong answer is A. An absolute monarch's power has no limits, and this queen's does.
2. A. The voters decide the budget and rules themselves, with no representatives in between. That is direct democracy.
The tempting wrong answer is B. In a representative democracy, voters would elect people to decide the budget for them.
3. C. The legislature, Parliament, chooses the head of government, and the prime minister depends on its support. That is a parliamentary democracy.
The tempting wrong answer is A. In a presidential democracy, voters would elect the leader separately, for a fixed term.
4. D. Power that comes from the people's consent rests on the idea that the people hold the final power, which is popular sovereignty.
The other three answers are real principles, but they are about how power is divided (A and B) or limited (C), not where it comes from.
5. B. Locke's lives and liberties became "Life, Liberty," and Jefferson replaced "estates," or property, with "the pursuit of Happiness."
The tempting wrong answer is C. It mentions consent, but it is a complaint about taxes, not a statement of natural rights.
6. C. Locke said people may replace a government that attacks their rights. Hobbes said people give up the right to rebel.
A, B, and D are tempting because both men would have agreed with them. The question asks for the one they disagreed about.
7. a. Natural rights · b. Social contract · c. Popular sovereignty · d. Rule of law · e. Limited government.
The pair most often mixed up is c and d. "The people hold the final power" is popular sovereignty; "no one is above the law" is rule of law.
8. A. The passage says even the king must follow "the law of the land" and cannot punish people as he pleases. That is the rule of law.
The tempting wrong answer is B. The passage limits the king, but it does not divide government into branches.
9. D. The Eighth Amendment says: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
The tempting wrong answer is B. The Declaration complains about the king's abuses, but these exact words went into the Bill of Rights.
10. B. By copying the Declaration and adding "and women," the writers claimed its promise of natural rights for women too.
The tempting wrong answer is D. The writers did not reject the Declaration; they demanded that its principles be applied to everyone.
11. A. The Declaration first says a government that destroys people's rights may be replaced. The grievances then give the evidence that the king had done that.
The tempting wrong answer is B. By July 1776 the colonists were no longer asking to stay British; the document declares independence.
12. C. The majority won the vote, but the rule would take away the minority's freedom of religion. In the American system, majority rule is limited by minority rights.
The tempting wrong answer is B. The problem is not the size of the majority. Even a 99 percent vote could not take away a protected right.
Questions to think about and discuss
These questions have no single right answer. They are for class, for a breakout room, or for writing a few sentences on your own.
- Locke said government exists to protect people's rights, and that the people may replace a government that attacks them. Who decides when a government has gone too far? What should people try before replacing a government?
- The man who wrote "all men are created equal" enslaved more than a hundred people when he wrote it, and more than six hundred over his lifetime. Does that make the words less true, or does it make them a promise that others could hold the country to? Think about Seneca Falls and Frederick Douglass.
- Have you ever been part of a group, at work, in a union, in a building, or in a family, where you felt the rules were made without your consent? What did you do, or what could you have done?
Where to go next
- On this site: Civics Flyover, Question One: Where does the government get its power? and The American Story, Movement Two: Revolution and the Problem of Power.
- Read the whole document: the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives.
- Read more: ushistory.org, American Government, which begins with the foundations of government.
- Read and watch: Khan Academy, Foundations of American Democracy.