The title of this book is taken from President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,”  a speech that he delivered while dedicating a cemetery on the battlefield at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, at the height of the Civil War.

Lincoln asked his listeners to consider whether a nation based on democratic principles—“a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—could actually survive.  Or did these democratic and egalitarian principles grant so much power to ordinary citizens that their unrestrained diversity would eventually tear the nation apart?

The answer to Lincoln’s question lies in the history of our nation.  It is the theme that animates the Georgia Standards of Excellence for high school U.S. history and that provides the underlying theme of this book.

A Nation Conceived in Liberty has nineteen content chapters, ranging from 17 to 38 pages in length, and provides cutting-edge historical interpretations. No other resource so closely follows Georgia’s Standards of Excellence for United States History.