Declaration different from any copy ‘we had seen’
It started with a one-line entry from the catalog of a tiny records office in the town of Chichester, in the south of England: “Manuscript copy, on parchment, of the Declaration in Congress of the thirteen United States of America.” As part of an effort to assemble a database on every known edition of the Declaration of Independence, Emily Sneff, a researcher with the Declaration Resources Project, stumbled upon the listing in August 2015. Although she didn’t think much of it at the time, that short description would set Sneff and Harvard’s Danielle Allen on a two-year journey into American history. “I’d found vague descriptions of other copies of the Declaration that turned out to be 19th-century reproductions of the signed parchment in the National Archives, so that was what I was expecting,” Sneff said of her initial impression based on the catalog listing. “What struck me as significant was that it...