they want to explai why they are fighting this war.

Talk about an unprecedented time in history.

There aren't really too many other countries that are doing something similar.

Welcome back to Curious about Civics.

Last time we learne about the branches of government and how they're structured with checks and balances so powers evenly distributed.

But why was the system created?

It all goes back to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.

I met with Professor Emily Conroy-Krutz to learn more.

The Declaration of Independence is the document that the Continental Congress signed on July 4th, 1776, that announced to a candid world that the United States was now free and independent and no longer a colony of Great Britain.

So the 13 colonies came together to declare independence.

But what was the context?

We can sort of date it a coupl of different ways, depending on how you want to tell the story.

I like to start in 1763.

That's the end of the Seven Years War between Great Britain and France, and it is the last of a series of wars between those two great empires over who was going to control North America.

At the end of that war Britain is triumphant.

The North American colonies are convinced that this is going to be the beginning of a great new era for them.

There's a lot of enthusiasm about what it means to be actually part of the British Empire.

So one of the really surprising things is that you go from 1763 to 1776, where at the end of the Seven Years War the British colonists are actually sort of mor enthusiastic about being British than they had been before t declaring independence in 1776.

And in between those years what happens is that basically, the British Empire is trying to figure out how to rule over this new, much more expansive empire than they've ever had before.

They've got debt is one of the big problems coming out of that war, and also trying to figure ou how to rule over these colonists who are trying to mov themselves into territory that Britain has come into control after the Seven Years War.

But that native Americans live in.

And so the British try and create what's called a proclamation line, where the colonists aren' supposed to move west of that.

And the colonist are very frustrated about that.

And the other thing the British do are passed a number of taxes, which the colonists are incredibly upset about as well.

And so, over the course of that decade, we're going to see a lot of upheaval among the colonists who are increasingly makin arguments about how the British do not have the right to directly tax them because they don't have representation in Parliament, and how they do not have th right to control their movement on the North American continent.

So now that we know the context, I'm curious about how the declaration was written.

It was written as part of a committee.

So in June, the Continental Congress voted on a resolution for independence.

And between June and July, you have a group of Congress members, including most famously, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who are coming together to write the Declaration of Independence.

Were there any sections?

Yes, it was divided into.

We can think of three sections, really.

First is the preamble, and this is the part that is the soaring languag that we remember so much today.

It opens with a sor of statement to the wider world that the colonies are and ought to be free.

The second section is the grievances, and this is the list of specific complaints that the colonists have against the king.

It begins with kind of more general concerns and becomes more and more, inflammatory as it goe on, ending with real statements about, that the King has, in fact, started war against the people.

And the third section then sort of closes with the sort of grand conclusio that for all of these reasons, the colonists ought to be a free country that is now able to go and d all of the things that any other independent country should do, like, creating commercial relationships, like declaring war and peace and creating a government that would rule itself.

That's some pretty important information.

Why not have something longer, and more detailed?

That's a great question.

I think the reason that you need to have something written and that it needs to be short and somewhat digestible, is that they're talking to foreign audience as well as a domestic audience, and they want to explai why they are fighting this war.

The United States was considerably smaller than Great Britain.

Britain was at this point the world's largest and most powerful army.

And navy.

And in order to win the war, they would need to have foreign assistance.

so they're speaking to all of those audiences, and they want to explain how this is not just a civil war.

This is not just a fight between two groups of one empire, but rather it is a legitimate battle between two different states that other countries can get involved in.

Was there anything unique or new about this declaration compared to other countries?

This is really one of the first of its kind.

The United States is one of the first colonies that's going to declare independence in this sort of way and create a kind of anti-colonial movement.

And so the declaration of Independence is going to go o to be a really important model for other countries going forward.

But at this point, There aren't really too many other countries that are doing something similar.

did this have any impacts?

It absolutely does.

So in the immediate moment the impact is both domestically with kind of creatin a sense of national belonging.

We have stories about, General Washington having the declaration read aloud to the continental Army as a way of explaining why they're fighting and what this cause is all about.

We also have it read in, individual towns throughout North America, as the colonists are able to come together and understand what the war is about.

It's translated into foreign languages pretty quickly as well and sent to European audiences who are able to read i in the newspaper, and elsewhere and get a sense of this new power is on the world stage.

And is this something that they want to maybe support the Americans in their fight against the British or not?

I didn't know that.

In the long term, the Declaration of Independence is really influential for other colonies around the world as they think about creating their own independence movements, and we see other countries that'll create their own declarations of independence that will model themselve a bit on the American example.

The time period of 1775 to 1848.

It's sometimes called the age of revolutions because the number of revolutions happening around the world.

And there were other social changes and movements happening, too.

Like the Industrial revolution and abolitionist movement.

Talk about an unprecedented time in history.

But there were a lot of changes that weren't fair for everyone, who was left out of the Declaration of Independence?

So were there any exclusions or oversights?

That's a really important question for a part of the declaration.

If you know one line, you probably know all men are created equal, which is such a powerful statement in the Declaration of Independence that was not realized at the time in 1776.

Most glaringly of course, slavery was in place throughout, the United States and also women's rights were, quite limited.

And if we want to look at who was votin in the generations, immediately after the American Revolution as well, working class people also did not have full political rights.

One of the things that's really important to think about with the declaration is how it's not just a statement for one moment in time.

President Lincoln would say that that principle of all men are created equal was one that was meant to be lived out in time.

And this is something that the American story has been working on for 250 years now, realizing those ideals that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776.

So let's review.

Signed in 1776 the Declaration of Independence is a written document establishing the United States as an independent country.

It includes a preamble, a list of grievances against the king, and the conclusion that the colonies should be an independent country.

It was translated into many languages, contributing to the beginning of a larger anti-colonial movement.

Finally, the United States has spent the last 250 years and is still working toward living up to the ideals of the declaration.

Thanks for watching this episode of Curious About Civics.