\u201cLife, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness\u201d\u2014this triad from 1776 forms the sacred foundation of today\u2019s superpower, the United States. Yet in 2026, in a nation torn apart from within, these words often sound like nothing more than a distant echo. While Donald Trump exploits the myth of the American quest for freedom to engineer a radical realignment of power in Washington, historian Hiram K\u00fcmper poses\u2014to himself and to all of us\u2014the uncomfortable question: Were the Founding Fathers truly concerned with universal human rights\u2014or simply with access to power and \u201cthe spoils of office\u201d? K\u00fcmper looks behind the glossy, polished heroic epic of white men and dissects a political ideology that exported its \u201cWay of Life\u201d globally while systematically excluding millions of enslaved Black and Indigenous people at home. Together with the Mannheim history professor\u2014also known from television\u2014and his non-fiction book \u201cMythos 1776,\u201d we shed light on the dark flip side of U.S. self-confidence: Who really paid the bitter price for the rise of this \u201cpower player\u201d? We explore the paradoxes of an iconic founding narrative that continues to fuel political extremes to this day\u2014and in doing so, we bring to light those who have all too often been forgotten in the official narrative. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Book Presentation & Conversation with Hiram K\u00fcmper, University of Mannheim<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4092,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","tags":[],"mec_category":[51],"class_list":["post-4093","mec-events","type-mec-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","mec_category-politics-society"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec-events\/4093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec-events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/mec-events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4093"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4093"},{"taxonomy":"mec_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec_category?post=4093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}