American Revolution

             Equality is something Americans strive to provide and maintain. It has become a necessary part of our culture. even now to the point that when people think of America, they naturally think of freedom and equality. The foundations of this country have relied upon it, just as it was the created by the events in the laying of those foundations. J.R. Pole states in his book, The Pursuit of Equality in American History, that the American Revolution plays an extremely significant role in the history of equality in American society. "The American Revolution in all its aspects constituted an upheaval which was also a point of departure and reference for all subsequent definitions of equality; it was a major event in the ideology and rhetoric of world history." (Pole, 3) Pole suggests that the reason for the start of the American Revolution was an "outraged sense of equality." America was so offended by its mother country, England, that they put an unbelievable amount of emphasis on the very idea of equality; making it the "center of the nation's public morality." (Pole, 38) When the revolution was over, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution -- the framework of this nation -- emphasized equality so greatly that it has now persuaded the rest of the world that America is, indeed, the so called, promised land; the land of freedom. "The men who led the colonial protest. had little idea that they were inaugurating an intellectual upheaval." (Pole, 132) Yet, by the time the Revolutionary War was done, America had a new identity and new egalitarian values. And this new equality "retained a remarkably central place as the moral imperative around which American thinking turned." (Pole, 132) Equality had begun, however inadvertently, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. Pole states that during the time of the Revolutionary War, it would have been foolish to believe that any event, no matter how significant or momentous, would have foreseen "the proclamation of the ideal of natural rights equality as the general principle of the American people.