What had happened between the Virginia charter and the Declaration of Independence to convince so many people that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed? The answer lies in artifacts as different as a deerskin cloak and a scarlet robe

Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage.

But if James’s divine right to rule was questioned by dissenters who fled his authority, it was being questioned, too, on the floor of Parliament.

Out of this same quarrel came foundational ideas about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, ideas premised on the belief, heretical to the medieval church, that there is no conflict between freedom and truth.

John Milton—later the author of Paradise Lost—published a pamphlet in which he argued against a law passed by Parliament requiring printers to secure licenses from the government for everything they printed. No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be establ

A people who do not believe land can be owned by individuals not only cannot contract to sell it, they cannot be said to have a government, because government only exists to protect property.

Archbishop Isidore of Seville, writing an encyclopedia called the Etymologiae that circulated widely in manuscript—as many as a thousand handwritten copies survive—had drawn the world as a circle surrounded by oceans and divided by seas into three bodies of land, Asia, Europe, and Africa, inhabited by the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Shem

Artists working for the sixteenth-century mestizo Diego Muñoz Camargo illustrated the Spanish punishment for native converts who abandoned Christianity.

to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.