Word: documental
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Declaration, and the congressional secretary, Charles Thomson, attested to his signature. Oddly, no member of the drafting committee seems to have gone along to John Dunlap's shop to supervise the printing?which accounts, perhaps, for the caprices of punctuation, capitalization and spelling that occur in the printed document. On July 5 and 6, the Declaration was sent out to all the colonies, and one copy was inserted into the Congress's "rough" (secret) journal...
Although independence had been months, even years, in coming, the week's events seemed startling in their sudden finality. July 2 declared the fact of separation. In another two days, on July 4, the Congress endorsed an extraordinary document, a Declaration that stated the Colonies' numerous reasons for leaving the imperial embrace. That date and that document may eventually loom larger in the American mind than what happened on July 2, for the Declaration, written by Jefferson, endows the revolt with a philosophical foundation and justification...
...story, Jefferson urged the task on John Adams, the brilliant, truculent Boston lawyer who had proved himself the ablest debater of the revolutionary cause. By this account, Adams demurred on grounds that he was personally "obnoxious" to many members of Congress, that a Virginian should write the document since Virginia had first moved for independence, and that, in any case, Jefferson was the superior writer...
Between June 11 and 28, Jefferson labored over the Declaration, writing on a portable writing box that he himself designed. The document that he produced?later amended slightly by the rest of the drafting committee and further altered by the Congress itself ?combines solemnly elevated thought with artful political stratagem. Its philosophy is not novel, nor did Jefferson intend it to be. The same general ideas, most completely developed by English Philosopher John Locke, have been a kind of political gospel in the Colonies for some years. Jefferson intended to state the common American sense, not to invent political...
Aside from its political origins, the pinlosophical roots of the Declaration are deep and varied. Even though Jefferson says, "I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it," the document reflects such classical ideas as Aristotle's perception of an unchangeable natural law pertaining to all men, and the Stoics' even more explicit assertion of a natural law knowable by men and thus capable of directing them, as rational and social animals, toward perfection. Such ideas took Christian form in the minds of teachers like St. Thomas Aquinas, who accepted from classical writers the concept that there...