'All men are created equal...' When Thomas Jefferson wrote these words in June 1776, in the American Declaration of Independence, he started something that was very much bigger than he imagined. This book looks at the history around that Declaration, and at the Revolution that led to the birth of the United States of America.

The Founding Fathers have been hailed for centuries as shining examples of men who put aside their own agendas to found a nation. But behind the scenes, there were more petty fights and fraught relationships than signatures on the Declaration of Independence.

Who are the real citizens of America? Which people truly qualify for equality under the law? Two hundred years ago, an honest answer to these questions would have excluded not only women, slaves, and Indians, but also Germans, Scotch-Irish, Catholics, and Jews. Yet the Declaration of Independence expresses a profound commitment to the ideal of equal citizenship.

On Thursday, December 16, 1773, an estimated seven dozen men, many amateurishly disguised as Indians - then a symbol of freedom - dumped about £10,000 worth of tea in the harbor. Whatever their motives at the time, they unleashed a social, political, and economic firestorm that would culminate in the Declaration of Independence two and a half years later.

When the United Nations General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, it was hailed as a major advancement for humanity. In the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, the majority of nations around the world worked together for the first time in history to affirm the importance of human life and dignity. This new book details how the Declaration was written through the tireless efforts of the drafting committee and of the Human Rights Commission, composed of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt of the United States, René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, P.C. Chang of China, and John Humphrey of Canada.