Randa Abdel-Fattah
speaker
3,221 appearances
41 recordings
9 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 38 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 15.
Appearances
Think at that point, you're saying, hey, we just reached the point of no return.
It means you don't get to turn back.
You got to keep marching ahead.
the Declaration begins.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them.
But it's the second sentence that everyone knows.
The second sentence is a mission statement for our nation.
A nation in which
The governance comes not from the divine right of kings or the sword of conquerors, but by a social contract that's signaled in the very first word of the sentence.
We.
It's a sentence that actually sets a new type of nation on this planet.
This is not the way the world worked 250 years ago, but more than half the nations on Earth now are pretty much guided by the principles of that sentence.
I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah, and this July 4th on ThruLine from NPR, we're doing a kind of document exploder, looking at the story of the Declaration of Independence, the messy drama that surrounded it, and what it all can tell us about how to find our way forward as a country in 2026.
Devastating compromises, midnight rides, a nail-biter vote, statue-toppling riots, that's all coming up.
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Today, the NPR Network proudly upholds your First Amendment rights with reporting accountable only to you.
It's something we protect together.
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The Continental Congress in June of 1776 finally decided they had to declare
Showing 761–780 of 3,221 · page 39 of 162
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