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Updates about new and special programming and changes to NHPR's program schedule.

Special Broadcast: Civics 101's 'The Declaration Does Not Apply'

Sara Plourde/NHPR

Join NHPR on Labor Day for a special broadcast from Civics 101. "The Declaration Does Not Apply" explores how the founders left three groups out of the Declaration of Independence - Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and women - and how those groups responded.

Civics 101 is NHPR's podcast about the basics of how our democracy works, and is co-hosted by Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy. This series revisits the Declaration of Independence, and three groups for which the tenants of life, liberty, and property enshrined in that document did not apply.

NHPR will air this special broadcast on Monday Sept. 5 at 2 pm and again at 9 pm.

Part 1: Byron Williams, author of The Radical Declaration, walks us through how enslaved Americans and Black Americans pushed against the document from the very beginning of our nation’s founding.

Part 2: Writer and activist Mark Charles lays out the anti-Native American sentiments within it, the doctrines and proclamations from before 1776 that justified ‘discovery,’ and the Supreme Court decisions that continue to cite them all.

Part 3: Laura Free, host of the podcast Amended and professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, tells us about the Declaration of Sentiments, the document at the heart of the women’s suffrage movement.

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