We the People Bookshelf: The Pursuit of Happiness
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
—Preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence
Our founding fathers asserted in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence our right, as Americans, to pursue happiness. But what does this right actually guarantee? Happiness is a fluid concept—one person’s delight may be another’s misery. While the Declaration of Independence declares that it is a self-evident truth that we have the right to pursue happiness, does this give us the right to attain it? The National Endowment for the Humanities We the People “Pursuit of Happiness” Bookshelf celebrates fifteen books that examine this central theme of our early founding document. The We the People Bookshelf website lists the entire selection of books, separated into appropriate grade categories, and also provides general information about the program.
There are as many paths to happiness as there are snowflakes falling in Robert Frost’s snowy wood, and some strategies are more successful in achieving that goal than others. The books featured on the We the People Bookshelf provide examples—both successful and unsuccessful—of a variety of ways in which historical figures and fictional characters have pursued happiness. EDSITEment has resources available on many of the works included in this Bookshelf, and can help students, teachers, and librarians in their understanding of the “the pursuit of happiness" theme.
Aesop’s Fables are among the first stories we hear as children that address the pursuit of happiness. Many of these fables are cautionary tales, teaching us life lessons and urging us to be measured in our pursuit, lest we lose what we have, such as the fable of “The Dog and His Shadow.” Fables, including Aesop’s, are the focus of several EDSITEment lesson plans for elementary school-aged students. Beginning learners can find out about not only Aesop’s Fables, but also about West African Ananse tales in the K-2 lesson plan Aesop and Ananse: Animal Fables and Trickster Tales. More advanced readers from the elementary grades can continue to learn about fables and trickster tales in the lesson plan for grades 3-5, Fables and Trickster Tales from Around the World. Finally, for the same age group, EDSITEment has a lesson plan that investigates similar morality tales in both Eastern and Western storytelling traditions: Morality “Tails” East and West: European Fables and Buddhist Jataka Tales. “The Dog and His Shadow” and hundreds of other fables are available through the EDSITEment-reviewed website Internet Public Library.
Featured in the We the People Bookshelf is the poet Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a poem that leads the reader to ask many questions about what the speaker’s pursuit may be. Ways of reading this poem, as well as many of Frost’s other well-known, narrative poems, is the focus of the EDSITEment lesson plan Poems The Tell a Story: Narrative and Persona in the Poetry of Robert Frost. The lesson, designed for students in grades 6 - 8, asks students to contemplate the persona in many of Frost’s most famous poems, including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” and “The Road Not Taken,” among others. Students can, for example, contemplate the impact of choice on the success or failure of their pursuit of happiness, as in the final lines of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
The role of choice in the pursuit of happiness is a major theme in another of the We the People Bookshelf selections: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. High school students can delve into the connection between happiness and acceptance with the EDSITEment lesson plan, The “Secret Society” and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The social rites and rules highlighted in this lesson will certainly resonate with many students, whose own sense of acceptance is often an important component of their pursuit of happiness.
While Gatsby’s search for happiness propelled him to seek acceptance in an established social circle, the family at the heart of Willa Cather’s novel, O Pioneers!, sought happiness through the formation of a new home and new society on the American frontier. O Pioneers! is one of several novels written by Cather set on the prairies of the American West. EDSITEment features a lesson plan on another of Cather’s frontier novels, Pioneer Values in Willa Cather’s My Antonia. The lesson plan is full of resources for teachers, students, and librarians that will open a window to the historical and cultural context of the period in which Cather’s frontier novels are set, including resources such as Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters at the EDSITEment-reviewed website American Memory.
The development and formation of the United States as we know it today is dependent upon the people, like Cather’s characters in O Pioneers!, who pursued happiness in the American West. While frontier families strove to settle new American outposts, poet Walt Whitman was seeking a distinctive voice for the young country from his home in Brooklyn, New York. His collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, a book that Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed," takes its place on the We the People Bookshelf in the works recommended for grads 9 - 12. EDSITEment has two lesson plans highlighting the work of Whitman, Walt Whitman’s Notebooks and Poetry: The Sweep of the Universe and Walt Whitman to Langston Hughes: Poems for a Democracy.
With a Bookshelf of works collected under the words made famous by the Declaration of Independence, students, teachers, and librarians might wish to return to the document whose preamble guarantees our right to that important pursuit. EDSITEment has a lesson plan for elementary school students that focuses on the Declaration of Independence, Declare the Causes: The Declaration of Independence In addition, the original document and a transcription of the text of the Declaration can be accessed through the EDSITEment-reviewed website The Digital Classroom. A reading of the original text can be supplemented with a look at another crucial early American document celebrating our pursuit of happiness—Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense. In upcoming months EDSITEment will be featuring two lesson plans, being created in partnership with the We the People program, which will focus on Paine’s text and the rhetoric of democracy.
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