Research Highlights

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 :...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When you see a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence, do you consider the manner in which it was produced? What the printer's shop may have looked like, how the printing press functioned, what color the paper and ink would have been when the...

One of our biggest projects in development is the creation of a database containing all known print and manuscript editions of the Declaration of Independence, from the first printings in 1776 through the 1820s. Why assemble this database? Because there...