Magna Carta: Eight Centuries of Liberty

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Conservatives and Republicans frequently cite the “rule of law” and “constitutional government” as the basis of our exceptional country, and point to the founding documents – the constitution and Declaration of Independence as defining a new direction in human history. These documents were not created from whole cloth however. We owe much to the British declaration of rights under King John in 1215 – the Magna Carta.

As Daniel Hannan wrote in the Wall Street Journal in May, to mark the 800th anniversary of that document:

“It was at Runnymede, on June 15, 1215, that the idea of the law standing above the government first took contractual form. King John accepted that he would no longer get to make the rules up as he went along. From that acceptance flowed, ultimately, all the rights and freedoms that we now take for granted: uncensored newspapers, security of property, equality before the law, habeas corpus, regular elections, sanctity of contract, jury trials.”

See the full article HERE.

Join us on September 23rd at Bear Lakes to hear PBAU Associate Professor of History Doctor Wes Borucki explain why this document is so relevant today.

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Dr. Borucki, who has taught at PBA since 2003, specializes in the antebellum South, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Colonial America, and presidential history. He teaches undergraduate history and humanities and also serves as a faculty member in the Frederick M. Supper Honors Program. Dr. Borucki’s first book, George H.W. Bush: In Defense of Principle, was published in early 2011 by Nova Science Publishers as part of its First Men: America’s Presidents series. His second book, Ronald Reagan: Heroic Dreamer, was published as part of the same series in 2014.

The history of sports is one of his side interests: his article “Moving on Up?: Whether Leaps to Division I-A in American College Football Benefit Universities” was published in June 2015 in The Journal of Sports Management and Commercialization; and in 2003, his article, “You’re Dixie’s Football Pride: American College Football and the Resurgence of Southern Nationalism,” was published in the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Dr. Borucki has written book reviews for The Journal of Southern History, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and The Alabama Review. He had the honor of serving as both a junior fellow and senior fellow in The University of Alabama’s Blount Undergraduate Initiative, in which he taught the freshman sequence of this interdisciplinary studies program that is similar to PBA’s humanities core program in its subject matter. At Alabama, he served as editor-in-chief of the journal Southern Historian in 1998-1999. He is a contributor to Oxford University Press’s Encyclopedia of African American History, Macmillan Press’ multi-volume Civil Rights in the United States, and the Gale Group’s Women in World History. His dissertation, “Yankees in King Cotton’s Court: Northerners in Antebellum and Wartime Alabama,” was the basis of presentations at the Families at War Conference at the University of Richmond, the Alabama Studies Symposium in Montgomery, and local historical group meetings for the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s Speakers Bureau. Dr. Borucki is a long-standing member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and is currently the secretary of the vestry of Redeemer Lutheran Church in West Palm Beach. He served as a lay delegate to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s convention in St. Louis in 1998 and to the LCMS’s Florida-Georgia District Conventions in 2006 and 2015.

Dr. Borucki has a B.A from Michigan State, an M.A from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, and a Ph.D. from the Univerity of Alabama.