About this episode

Emily Sneff discusses how the Declaration of Independence was initially received and its impact on public opinion during the American Revolution.

"There was a time when the Declaration of Independence was news. Most books written about the Declaration have pursued questions about its precedence and authorship as well as its legacy. In 1776, when the Declaration was news, it was part of an ever-changing and circulating amalgam of accurate and inaccurate information, gossip, military intelligence, speculation, and opinion. At approximately one thousand three hundred and twenty words from ‘When in the Course of Human Events’ through ‘Our Sacred Honor,’ the Declaration took fewer than ten minutes to read and filled only one or two columns of a typical newspaper. This was a text that could be communicated swiftly, but it was also a text for which the context in which it was communicated mattered. The questions of who experienced the news of independence and when and how they did so reveal a critical, overlooked history of the American Revolution.” Those are the words of my guest Emily Sneff in her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News . It is a book that reframes the Declaration and enables us to see it in a new way: at a moment when the success of the Revolution was far from inevitable, and when the mere…

People in this episode

Host: Al Zambone

Guest: Emily Sneff

Topics covered

• Declaration of Independence
• American Revolution
• historical context
• media and communication
• public perception
• historical memory

Keywords

• Declaration of Independence
• Emily Sneff
• American Revolution
• historical context
• media
• public perception
• historical memory

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: When the Declaration of Independence Was News

Places: United States

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