Free and Independent: The Declaration of Independence
A library is the perfect place to explore the origins of a country founded on words.
What did Congress mean when they declared that “all men are created equal,” that people had an unalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness,” that the British King was a “tyrant,” or that the former colonies were now “Free and Independent States”? How did contemporaries of all kinds in 1776 interpret these words? And how might our own understandings differ, 250 years later?
This exhibition, anchored by a rare early copy of the Declaration of Independence, invites visitors to survey the words of the founding document of the United States, to consider some of the surprising ideas behind those words, and to trace their circulation and impact in the age of the American Revolution.
Whimsical vintage type reminiscent of letterpress makes these rubber-tipped wooden stamps perfect for card making, scrapbooking, dot journaling, labeling, crafting, art journaling, and so much more! The rustic wooden box with metal clasp includes 70 stamps: 52 stamps of the alphabet in upper and lower case letters, 8 punctuation stamps, and 10 numbers stamps. Wooden box measures 5-3/4" wide x 3-3/8" deep x 2" deep (12.7 cm wide x 7.6 cm deep x 5 cm deep). Stamps are 1-1/2" (3.8 cm) high, with rubber stamping tip measuring 1/2" x 3/8" (1.27 cm x .95 cm).
Explore the heart of American democracy with this comprehensive keepsake volume!
- Handsome gift book brings together the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, known together as the Founding Documents.
- Additionally, the volume includes Amendments 11 through 27.
- A concise and engaging Introduction illuminates the vital texts that formed the blueprint for a new republic, documents that have shaped the United States for 250 years.
- Elegant presentation: Beautiful hardcover gift edition is embossed and embellished with hand-selected gold foil accents, including cover medallions of wreath-encircled eagles.
- Each turn of the page is accentuated by gilded-gold edges that catch the light.
- Preserving history: Printed on premium acid-free archival-quality paper for longevity.
- Designed for portability: Compact volume measures 4-1/2'' wide x 7-1/2'' high.
- 80 pages encapsulate the essence of America's foundational principles.
- An indispensable addition to any personal or professional library.
The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But does the nation begin in 1776, or do we trace its origins to some point earlier--for example, the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619 or the initial settlement of Indigenous people? What's at stake with establishing a date that marks the nation's origins? Where does the history of the nation begin? In colonial New England, the Chesapeake, or in the Southwest?
In this unprecedented volume, leading thinkers come together to debate these--and many other--issues. Their conversation shows that U.S history is not just about what happened but who gets to tell the story and the political implications of the narratives we tell. The participants include two Pulitzer Prize winners: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project and ignited a national conversation about slavery and the nation's founding; and Annette Gordon-Reed, who documented Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings. The other specialists include experts in Asian American, civil rights, Native American, Latino, LGBT, and early American history.
A history of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, from Revolutionary War allies to modern resurgence
How did the Oneida Nation of northeastern Wisconsin--stripped of nearly all its reservation lands by the early twentieth century--rise to become a powerful political and economic force in Native America and the present-day Midwest? Doug Kiel traces the journey of resurgence, adaptation, and nation rebuilding of the Oneida people, who navigated federal policies and socioeconomic shifts to chart their own future, transforming adversity into opportunity.
Kiel shows how Oneidas harnessed New Deal programs to advance their goals of self-determination; how urban migration, often seen as a marker of Indigenous displacement, became a tool of community empowerment; and how the Nation has reclaimed land and authority despite predictable backlash from neighboring towns. Drawing on extensive archival records, family photographs, and oral histories--including stories from his grandmother--Kiel highlights the everyday acts that have sustained the Oneida Nation across generations and offers vital insights into the broader fight for Indigenous nationhood in twenty-first-century America.
Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection
The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat? We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean. Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. --from "Unrest in Baton Rouge" In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice--inquisitive, lyrical, and wry--turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.
An "unsparing, erudite, and incisive" (Jelani Cobb, staff writer, The New Yorker) reframing of the past and present of Black resistance--both nonviolent and violent--to white supremacy Named a Best Book of 2024 by Smithsonian * Kirkus * Chicago Review of Books * Emancipator * Ms. Magazine Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of "Black violence" as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force--from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt--has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away. Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation. Winner of the Organization of American Historians' 2025 Darlene Clark Hines Award
The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades--and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths.
Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding--the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions--We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. "One of the Constitution's founding purposes was to prevent change," Lepore writes. "Another was to allow for change without violence." Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat.
Challenging both the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of "originalism," Lepore contends in this "gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past" that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process.
Lepore's remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore "has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union." At a time when the Constitution's vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.
Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding--the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions--We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. "One of the Constitution's founding purposes was to prevent change," Lepore writes. "Another was to allow for change without violence." Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat.
Challenging both the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of "originalism," Lepore contends in this "gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past" that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process.
Lepore's remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore "has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union." At a time when the Constitution's vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.
Tracing the moments after its creation, this groundbreaking book follows how news of the Declaration of Independence spread to people throughout the thirteen United States and the Atlantic world.
In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators. When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution. Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it.
In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators. When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution. Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it.
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