The kids and I listened to David Barton’s Wallbuilders’ podcast yesterday while driving.

It was pathetic that most people, those who were walking on the streets of Philadelphia, could not answer this question:

“What do we celebrate on the Fourth of July?”

Most people stammered or gave an incorrect answer. One person who actually gave a correct answer was from Russia.

So what do we do about this sad, sorry lack of knowledge? How can we keep our liberties if we don’t know the history of gaining them?

We educate ourselves and we encourage others to get educated. So here’s a great source for education, Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom. Tom holds a PhD in history from Columbia, as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Harvard. He’s also a bestselling author and libertarian thinker. He created the Liberty Classroom. This is an EPIC resource to learn American history from someone  who believes in God, doesn’t revise history to reflect political correctness, and treasures the heritage of Western civilization.

He’s giving a 50% discount on his Liberty Classroom lifetime membership today. Scroll below to get the coupon code.

Read why it’s so important to learn about this day, Independence Day, in his own words:

Independence Day is coming up, and I wonder how many people really get why it matters.

In school, we were told this: “No taxation without representation.”

Zzzzzzzz.

The real principles were more like the following.

(1) No legislation without representation.

The colonists insisted that they could be governed only by the colonial legislatures. This is the principle of self-government.

This is why a Supreme Court ordering localities around is anti-American in the truest sense. It operates according to the opposite principle from the one the American colonists stood for.

(2) Contrary to the modern Western view of the state that it must be considered one and indivisible, the colonists believed that a smaller unit may withdraw from a larger one. Today we are supposed to consider this unthinkable.

(3) The colonists’ view of the (unwritten) British constitution was that Parliament could legislate only in those areas that had traditionally been within the purview of the British government. Customary practice was the test of constitutionality. The Parliament’s view, on the other hand, was in effect that the will and act of Parliament sufficed to make its measures constitutional.

So the colonists insisted on strict construction, if you will, while the British held to more of a “living, breathing” view of the Constitution. Sound familiar?

So let’s recap: local self-government, secession, and strict construction. Not exactly the themes you learned in school.

And not even what you’ll learn in graduate school.
One day I decided I had to know what my fellow Columbia Ph.D. students thought Independence Day was all about.

What could these left-liberals be celebrating? They don’t favor local self-government, which is what the war was all about. They don’t favor strict construction of the Constitution, while the colonists were insisting on precisely that, in a British context.

So what the heck did they think it was all about?

Only one person answered me: “There was a distance involved.”

So the problem was that the ruling class was too far away?

“Come on, men, we must continue making sacrifices so that we may someday have exploiters who live close by!”

I don’t think so.

This was a student at what at that time was the #2 academic department in the country for American history.

He and the other students didn’t know five percent of what’s taught in just the American Revolution course alone at my Liberty Classroom.

And for Independence Day, I’m knocking 150 smackers off the lifetime, Master membership.

Will you know more than a Columbia University graduate student if you listen to these history and economics courses, taught by me and by people I trust, in your car?

Yes, but that’s not saying much — trust me.

More to the point, you will take direct aim at the educational malpractice we all suffered from.

You’ll need coupon code FIREWORKS (all caps).

This offer fizzles out like a bottle rocket at midnight on July 4, so click away:

Liberty Classroom Lifetime Membership

That’s the end of Tom’s words, now back to mine (Celestia’s):

Enjoy this picture, from my “National Treasure” tour of Lafayette’s cannon from the battle of Yorktown, below. Notice the dent in it from a cannonball hitting it. Tradition says that when Lafayette toured America in 1824 he noticed the dent, became sentimental, and embraced the cannon.

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