Individual+Rights

In which of our national document(s) (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, etc…) can you find the core ideal Individual Rights?
 * Core Ideals of American Society**

We draw individual rights from so many of our American documents, we honestly should try to represent individual rights in every document passed through congress because we are a country with a government made for the people by the people. The declaration of independence is the first document that represents individual rights for the citizens of our country. In the declaration of independence we as a people stated we would and could not allow our rights to be violated by a foreign power. Then comes in the constitution of our country. Its entire purpose, if you ask me, is that it should define the rules of our government in hopes to keep it from taking the rights deserved by the people. It was closely followed by another great document that has a huge effect on the individual rights of our country, the bill of rights. The bill was made to make sure that the government could not take away rights such as the right to speak our mind, to gather, and many more, it was created in the effort to keep the people in control of our country and to not have to deal with someone trying to gain absolute power over us as citizens. Finally we will go to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to our constitution. These amendments gave individual rights to the blacks in our country, officially making it where no one race was excluded based on appearance and giving them the rights that they truly deserve as a person. In all honesty, I could go on for hours about the different documents and laws and how they expressly pertain to giving us rights as a people, in this long paragraph I have only scratched the surface on the knowledge I have learned about our rights and where they came from in the years I have spent trying to grasp and understand the knowledge taught to me in history classes.

As a society today, or throughout our history, explain how have we moved toward and/or away from that ideal.

Our country as a whole has moved towards, and away from the freedoms we get from individual rights. Throughout our country's history we have written and passed into laws documents to insure our individual rights. Moving towards that through the declaration of independence to amendments wrote and passed in the last 100 years. We wrote the bill of rights, to allow us to protect our God-given rights. We wrote the 13th-15th amendments to give blacks the rights they deserved. We wrote amendments to give women equal rights as men. We did all this in pursuit of a country where our individual rights could not be corrupted or taken away. However, in the recent years, with multiple wars, and even an attack on our country's land, we have had a slight hiccup in this pursuit to preserve our rights as a citizen. That hiccup is called the US Patriot Act, it was passed in the aftermath of 9/11 and has taken away some rights we previously would not have dared give away. However we can only hope that in the coming years we will be able to take back these rights as the need for the Patriot Act lessens. Our country has constantly progressed towards furthering individual right since the birth of our nation.