Collections: On the Declaration of Independence

Hello again all. It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week’s post to talk about the United States. This is going to be a bit more of an open musing than an argument as compared to previous years (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) because my attention has been turned this way and that over the past few weeks and then just when I thought I’d be able to focus on this, one of home ownership’s many annoyances (a busted pipe) cropped up to consume much of the week. Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence turns 250 this year – ratified on July 4, published on July 6, read aloud in public on July 8, 1776 – and I want to muse on it a bit, with some focus to the actual text. Americans revere our founding documents (the Declaration and the Constitution) but I fear we do not read them very often. I was a ‘pocket-constitution’ kind of fellow in college, but one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about…