Declaration of Independence issued

Quaker and evangelical campaigners formed an organized national antislavery society. Its petitioning, print campaigns and consumer boycotts helped create a model for civil-society pressure on...

The revolutionary declaration made equal citizenship a powerful political claim. Women, enslaved people and colonial subjects exposed its limits by demanding that its universal language apply to...

De Gouges rewrote revolutionary rights language to include women as citizens. Her text challenged the gender boundary of republican inclusion and became a landmark in feminist political writing.

Wollstonecraft argued that women’s apparent inferiority was produced by unequal education and social arrangements. Her writing made access to education and civic participation central political...

Parliament prohibited British participation in the transatlantic slave trade after decades of abolitionist organizing and resistance by enslaved people. It did not abolish slavery itself, illustrating...