A.O. Scott is a Times critic who writes about literature and ideas. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” Walt Whitman wrote, but the nation was conceived in prose. Other ...

Red-headed, spindle-shanked Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three years old when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, in 1776; he was so young and, as it turned out, so long-lived that he had ...

The Declaration of Independence was first shared through public readings, not signatures. It took time to appear in printed versions. The famous engrossed parchment copy was not signed on a single day ...

The New York Historical thinks it has identified the anonymous printer behind a rare broadside printing of the Declaration made soon after July 4, 1776. By Jennifer Schuessler Before the Declaration ...