In Dissent traces the founding ideals of the Declaration of Independence from the revolutionary moment of their birth to the courtrooms where they’ve been tested, twisted, and sometimes abandoned. Each episode pairs vivid historical storytelling—a man riding through the night to break a deadlocked vote, a printer setting type for a document that could get him hanged—with landmark Supreme Court cases that reveal the distance between America’s founding promise and its legal reality.

A man rushing on horseback in the dead of night to break a deadlocked vote. A printer faced with the terrifying ramifications of printing an incendiary document. And beleaguered troops—underfed, underpaid, and on the verge of defeat. 

In hindsight, the American Independence seems inevitable. But at the time, it was anything but. In the opening episode, Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Ellis, historian and biographer Richard Brookhiser, and Professor of American History Dermot Trainor describe the origins of the first great American dissent: The Declaration of Independence.