Today's lesson of the day came early as I, in all my bright-eyed bushy-tailedness woke up to Good Morning America's 4th of July celebration. There was a report on the Declaration of Independence and the good people at the Smithsonian who were working on restoring the original document. It turns out that the phrase "my fellow citizens" was part of a draft of the Declaration of Independence that never made it into the final copy.
But underneath the word "citizens" was another word that until recently, historians couldn't quite make out. It turns out that Thomas Jefferson had originally written "subjects" but later smudged the word and replaced it with "citizens" so as not to reference the colony's relationship with England.
Another fact that I learned today from my newspaper: Thomas Jefferson died on 4th of July.
No comments:
Post a Comment