On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted unanimously to declare independence from Great Britain.

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, with its block of cursive letters scrawled onto parchment, looks like a relic from the distant past. Likewise, you might think the 27 grievances against King George ...