Wed, Feb 11th

Today the subject is the Declaration of Independence. Yesterday we talked about Thomas Paine's contributions to Independence. Today we discussed the importance of John Locke. Locke wrote about the Social Contract Theory of government back in 1688. His beliefs become the basis for our Declaration and our form of government. Locke believed all people has natural rights. This means these rights are given to everybody from birth. Locke believed these rights were: life, liberty and property. He theorized that the reasons governments were created is for the protection of these rights and since people came together to form the governments then the power of government rests with the people. Government by the consent of the governed is the basis of our government. In America we vote every November to give our consent to our government.

You should add to the note outline on handout #19 this info on Locke's Social Contract Theory. This should be right under Paine's Common Sense.

To finish out the notes outline, the Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson with help from the "Committee of Five". The parts to the Declaration of Independence are: 1)Preamble, 2)Declaration of Rights, 3)List of Grievances, 4)Formal statement of Declaration. These parts of the Declaration are important and you should look in your textbook to skim through these. The Declaration is on page 134.

Today we also worked extensively on the most important part to the Declaration and that is the Declaration of Natural Rights. In this section Jefferson gave his philosophical statement on why the colonists had the right to declare independence and what type of governmental system the newly created country would have. Essentially this section describes us as a country!

You should be able to pick out the parts of this section that come directly from John Locke. We did this in class. Also, you should try and rewrite this section in your own words. This will be important for understanding and to effectively complete the Declaration activity that we will do in groups.