LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Declaration of Independence: United States
built 204 days ago
On Monday, July 8, the Declaration of Independence was "proclaimed" (read aloud) by Col. John Nixon of the Philadelphia Committee of Safety at the State House in Philadelphia. It was ... read again that evening before the militia on the Commons. Throughout the city, bells were rung all day. On that day as well the Declaration was publicly read in Easton, Pennsylvania, and Trenton, New Jersey. It was these first public readings which constituted America's first celebrations of the Fourth of July. Typically in towns and cities across the nation accompanying the oral declarations were loud shouts, huzzas, firings of muskets, and the tearing down of the British emblems.
Source:
The constitutional and legal status of the Declaration of Independence is curiously ambiguous. John Hancock (in his capacity as president of the Second Continental Congress) and James Madison both considered it to be, in Madison's words, “the fundamental Act of Union of these States.†Reflecting that view, Congress has placed it at the head of the United States Code, under the caption, “The Organic Laws of the United States of America.†The Supreme Court has infrequently accorded it binding legal force, for example, in resolving questions of alienage (Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbour, 1830). Yet lawyers generally, and the Supreme Court in particular, have been reluctant to treat the Declaration as part of American organic law, or even to accord it the restricted status of the Preamble to the Constitution. Conservatives like Daniel Webster denied that there is a constitutionally recognized right of revolution, and those state supreme courts that have addressed the issue in the twentieth century have adopted Webster's view. Reformers, such as antebellum abolitionists, insisted that the Declaration was part of the constitutional order, while their opponents, including John C. Calhoun, denigrated its authority and validity. The adoption of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments allayed the urgency of that question by incorporating concepts of equality, freedom, and citizenship into the operative constitutional text.
Source:
Rhodesian Declaration of Independence (1965) - Ian Smith's white minority government declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. Few states accepted this declaration's legitimacy. The UDI Rhodesian state was ultimately replaced under the Lancaster House Agreement by a restored British regime under a governor: Lord Soames. Within a short time, a new, much more widely recognized independent state, Zimbabwe, came into existence.
Source:
In one vibrant paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson managed to compress both a résumé of American constitutional theory that justified the struggle for independence and a précis of a revolutionary, republican theory of government. “All men are created equalâ€; they enjoy “unalienable Rights†(this repudiated arguments by Thomas Hobbes and William Blackstone that people surrender their natural rights when they leave the state of nature); these rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness†(a liberal and literary improvement on John Locke's triad of life, liberty, and property); governments exist to protect those rights; governments are created by “the consent of the governed†(the compact theory); the people retain the right “to alter or to abolish†government when it violates its ends, “and to institute new Government†to secure the people's “Safety and Happiness†(the commonwealth theory). In their totality, these concepts provided a comprehensive statement of popular sovereignty.
Source:
Philippine Declaration of Independence (1898) - The Philippines were declared independent from Spain by Emilio Aguinaldo on June 12, 1898 when the Spanish-American War was still under way. However, neither Spain nor the United States recognized the declaration. De facto Philippine independence was finally achieved and recognized on July 4, 1946 after 48 years of United States colonial rule.
Source:
The people of America like the Declaration of Independence a lot. Every year on the day of July 4, they have a party. They do this to remember the day that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration, and the day that the United States of America became a country. There are parades, fireworks, and songs.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
United States