Justin Buckley Dyer is a professor in political science at the University of Missouri.

AcknowledgementsForewordIntroductionPart I: The Declaration and the American FoundingChapter 1: Continental Congress, The Declaration of Independence (1776)Chapter 2: Thomas Jefferson, Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776)Chapter 3: John Adams, Letters to Abigail (1776)Chapter 4: Jeremy Bentham, A Short Review of the Declaration (1826)Chapter 5: Thomas Jefferson, The American Mind (1826)Chapter 6: James Wilson, Popular Sovereignty (1787)Chapter 7: Daniel Webster, Keeping the Revolution (1802:Chapter 8: Lemuel Shaw, The American and French Revolutions (1815)Chapter 9: John Quincy Adams, American Principles (1821)Chapter 10: Thomas Jefferson, Fifty Years Later (1826)Chapter 11: William Wirt, The Lives and Characters of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (1826)Part II: The Declaration in a House DividedChapter 12: "A Great Number of Blackes," Petition for Freedom (1777)Chapter 13: Luther Martin, The Constitution and Slavery (1788)Chapter 14: William Lloyd Garrison, Republican Consistency! (1838)Chapter 15: John Quincy Adams, Amistad Argument (1841)Chapter 16: John C. Calhoun, The Cause of the Present Crisis (1848)Chapter 17: Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (1852)Chapter 18: Republican National Convention, Party Platform (1856)Chapter 19: Chief Justice Roger Taney, The Dred Scott Decision (1857)Chapter 20: Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Debate on the Dred Scott Decision (1858)Chapter 21: Alexander Stephens, The Chief Cornerstone (1861)Chapter 22: Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863)Chapter 23: United States Congress, Reconstructing America (1864-1870)Part III: The Declaration in the Modern WorldChapter 24: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, Seneca Falls Declaration (1848)Chapter 25: National Woman Suffrage Association, Declaration of the Rights of Women (1876)Chapter 26: Carrie Chapmen Catt, The Inevitability of Women's Suffrage (1917)Chapter 27: Woodrow Wilson, What is Progress? (1912)Chapter 28: Calvin Coolidge, Speech on the Fourth of July (1926)Chapter 29: Franklin Roosevelt, Commonwealth Club Address (1932)Chapter 30: Thurgood Marshall, Speech at the Bicentennial (1987)Chapter 31: Ronald Reagan, The Sanctity of Human Life (1984)Chapter 32: George W. Bush, America's Work in the World (2003)Chapter 33: Barack Obama, A More Perfect Union (2008)

American Soul brings together a variety of primary source documents related to the contested meaning and legacy of the Declaration of Independence, and the various speeches and writings assembled together demonstrate how competing interpretations of the Declaration have shaped, and been shaped by, two and a half centuries of political conflict in America.