The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence, whose 250th anniversary Americans will commemorate in two years, is the United States’ founding text. This colloquium will focus on what the Declaration meant to Americans in 1776 and what it has come to mean since. Topics will include the Declaration’s origins, the Declaration’s impact on people on the margins of American society — women, African Americans, and Native Americans — and the way that a document written by a Congress of white men, most of whom were enslavers and investors in Indian land, became a charter of freedom and democracy. The colloquium will spend the first half of the semester doing common reading, then write a 15-page research paper that can be on any topic (with the professor’s approval) pertaining to the Declaration broadly conceived but that must be based on primary sources.