A rare copy of the Declaration of Independence will make its way around Maine later this year, as part of a statewide tour to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
The Maine Historical Society has maintained a copy for more than 100 years. It’s one of the 26 remaining copies of what’s known as the Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration of Independence, also considered one of the first public copies.
Liam Riordan, a history professor at the University of Maine, said the language was edited by the Continental Congress and agreed to on July 4, 1776.
“When they’ve got the text decided upon, they rush it to a Philadelphia printer, Robert Dunlap,” Riordan said Friday on “Maine Calling.” “He prints it through the night. We don’t really know how many copies he printed overnight … But we do know that only 26 copies survive today, and one of them is at the Maine Historical Society.”
The tour will start in July and make stops at all of Maine’s 16 counties through October. The copy of the declaration will be on display in each location for a few days at a time. Some communities also will host their own events to commemorate Maine’s role in the Revolution.
Steve Bromage, executive director of the Maine Historical Society, is hopeful that the planned events will help Mainers consider the declaration’s conflicting messages.
“On one hand, the declaration has these soaring ideals that were really radical at their time. Those words are so powerful,” he said. “But at the same time, the founders also denied basic rights to women, people of color [and] Indigenous people, who are called out in a really horrific passage. So I think holding those things together and understanding the idealism, and that for 250 years we’ve been striving to achieve those ideals.”
“That’s one of the things we hope will happen with our tour and the programming this year, to get every one of us to read those words, to get out of the media cultural sound bubble and go back into ourselves and think, what does that mean to me?” Bromage added. “What are our responsibilities as citizens and how do we really create a more productive civic dialogue?”
The historical society is also planning a celebration on July 4 in Portland, an exhibition about Maine’s experience during the American Revolution and other lectures and school programs.
A full list of the tour stops can be found at the Maine Historical Society’s website.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
