Course of Human Events

Delegate Discussions: The Lee Resolution(s)

June 07, 2018

Independence, confederation, and foreign alliances. For months, these three elements were the talk of the Continental Congress. When Richard Henry Lee’s resolution was presented on June 7, 1776, it called for these three things, in this order: That these...

Research Highlight: The Green Broadside

January 22, 2018

In 1949, Michael Walsh published a census of “Contemporary Broadside Editions of the Declaration of Independence” in the Harvard Library Bulletin. The Boston Public Library holds the only known copy of a broadside described by Walsh as follows :...

December Highlight: Dunlap

December 04, 2017

For this month's Research Highlight, we're going back to the basics: the who, what, where, when, and why of the very first printing of the Declaration of Independence, the Dunlap broadside! WHO John Dunlap was born in 1746 or 1747 in Strabane, County...

November Highlight: Charles Thomson

November 04, 2017

Charles Thomson. He was the first and only Secretary of the Continental Congress. His name is on the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. The manuscript Journals of the Continental Congress are in his hand. He created the final, approved...

October Highlight: Abigail and John

October 04, 2017

In First Family: Abigail and John Adams, Joseph Ellis claims, “there were other prominent couples in the revolutionary era... But no other couple left a documentary record of their mutual thoughts and feelings even remotely comparable to Abigail and John...

A Conversation with Joseph M. Adelman

September 20, 2017

Joseph M. Adelman is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts. He is currently at work on two book projects; the first focuses on the business of printing and circulation of political...

September Highlight: The Declaration and the Constitution

September 04, 2017

When the engrossed parchment copies of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were installed at the National Archives on December 15, 1952, President Harry S. Truman connected the two documents as follows: “Everyone who holds...

Unsullied by Falsehood: The Present ---- of G---- B------

August 16, 2017

The news and text of the Declaration of Independence reached England by mid-August 1776. In the newly United States, the text had been printed in over 30 newspapers in the span of a month. In Great Britain and Ireland, the Declaration was printed in still...

August Highlight: Son of a Signer

August 04, 2017

On July 11th, 1776, John Quincy Adams turned 9 years old. On July 12th, he was inoculated for smallpox along with his mother Abigail and his siblings. And on July 13th, Abigail received her husband John’s letters with news of the Declaration of...

July Highlight: The First Anniversary

July 04, 2017

Holidays and anniversaries can often sneak up on people. That seems to be the case in Philadelphia on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1777. In the defense of the Continental Congress, they were a bit busy. In that first...

June Highlight: The Adams Family

June 04, 2017

A few of John Adams' cousins are well-known; his first cousin Samuel, for example, or his wife Abigail (a third cousin). But did you know Adams discovered another cousin through a copy of the Declaration of Independence? On May 16, 1818, Benjamin Owen...

A Conversation with Authors Barbara Kerley, Steve Sheinkin, and Gretchen Woelfle

May 30, 2017

Do you remember how you first learned about the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence? Perhaps in the classroom, or on a visit to a historic site. Or, perhaps, through a book. Jean Fritz, who recently passed away, authored Will You Sign...