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The document was drafted by a committee appointed by the Second Continental Congress in mid-June 1777 and was adopted by the full Congress in mid-November of that year. Ratification by the 13 colonies took more than three years and was completed March 1, 1781.
The document signed by Congress and enshrined in the National Archives is usually regarded as the Declaration of Independence, but historian Julian P. Boyd argued that the Declaration, like Magna Carta, is not a single document. Boyd considered the printed broadsides ordered by Congress to be official texts, as well.
In earlier documents, including the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France, the Articles of Confederation, and the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognizing American independence, the word "people" was not used, and the phrase the United States was followed immediately by a listing of the states, from north to south. [1]
Members of the public will get a chance to take a sneak peek at the document, which will be on display at Federal Hall National Memorial in New York from 1 to 4:30 p.m. EDT on Friday, Sept. 13.
Download as PDF; Printable version; ... African-American documents (1 C, 7 P) ... Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; ...
The documents include the United States Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. While the term has not entered particularly common usage, the room at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. that houses the three documents is called the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom.
The text of each document is carved into a series of porcelain enamel panels. Sadly, the Hall is closed to the public (the half-ton slab probably already gave that away).
According to the Archives, these documents "have secured the rights of the American people for nearly two and a half centuries and are considered instrumental to the founding and philosophy of the United States." [43] In addition, as the nation's first constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union is also a founding document.