NJARRT Meeting: America’s Birth Certificate: The Declaration of Independence

The NJARRT meeting will take place at Morristown National Historical Park Museum Auditorium and via zoom.

June 12, 2025 (Richard Bell) @ 7pm

America’s Birth Certificate: The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is a peculiar thing. It’s a literary masterpiece that was written jointly by a committee of fifty people. It’s short and punchy—just 1310 words long—but still somehow daunting and difficult to get to grips with (there’s a reason most of us have never read it in full and can only quote the first third of its second sentence). And what is it exactly? Is it a birth certificate announcing happy news, or a petition for divorce full of grievance and score-settling, or something else? Is it aimed at the American people, or King George, or someone else? Was it the first ever declaration of independence, or a cheap imitation of a genre already well established? What did people at the time make of it? What did it change? Why does it matter? In this lecture, Richard Bell will tackle the fascinating origins, misunderstood purpose, and extraordinary global legacy of the Declaration of Independence.

Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland and author of the book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. He serves as a Trustee of the Maryland Center for History and Culture and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.