The Gilder Lehrman Institute recommends the books listed here, which represent the very best in recent scholarship on the origins, impact, and legacy of the Declaration of Independence.

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• Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
• Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
• Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
• Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
• McCullough, David. 1776. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.
• Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
• Nash, Gary B. The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Brunsman, Denver, and David J. Silverman, eds. The American Revolution Reader. New York: Routledge, 2013.
• Ellis, Joseph J. Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
• Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright, 2014.
• Horne, Gerald. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
• Wills, Garry. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 2018.

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