"Professor Conklin is one of those exceedingly rare and invaluable scholars who unites in a single analysis of the founders' thought the four traditions that most influenced them--the classical heritage, Christianity, the English legal tradition, and the Scottish Enlightenment--rather than advocate for the primacy of a single heritage. She presents a cogent argument that the glue that held these diverse influences together was their shared conception of 'the pursuit of happiness.'"-- Carl Richard , University of Louisiana at Lafayette, author of The Battle for the American Mind: A Brief History of a Nation's Thought "Carli Conklin's study is an original, significant, and well-documented contextualization of 'the pursuit of happiness' in the main currents of eighteenth-century British and American legal and political thought, philosophy, and religious thought. It is an important contribution to eighteenth-century intellectual history."-- Alan Charles Kors , University of Pennsylvania, author of Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650-1729 and Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650-1729 "This is the first full-scale effort to understand the founding-era meaning of the phrase 'pursuit of happiness' in the Declaration of Independence. Through a careful analysis of contemporary sources, Carli Conklin demonstrates that the phrase was not simply a placeholder for a right of property, or a rhetorical device without clear substantive content. Instead it was an encapsulation of the view that 'happiness' for humans came from a combination of an appreciation of the natural world and a recognition of the place of human agency within it."-- G.

Edward White , David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia, author of Law in American History, Volume 1: From the Colonial Years Through the Civil War.