1: On July 2nd, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Britain.

The following day, July 3rd, final revisions to Thomas Jefferson‘s draft of The Declaration of Independence were agreed to.

Which brings us to the 4th of July, 1776.

“In later years the excessive summer heat of Philadelphia would frequently figure in accounts of Thursday, July 4th, 1776,” David McCullough writes in his Pulitzer … continue reading

1: “Monday, July 1st, 1776, began hot and steamy in Philadelphia, and before the morning was ended a full-scale summer storm would break,” David McCullough writes in his book John Adams.

John Adams, then one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress, was up before sunrise. 

Early that morning, he wrote a long letter to Archibald Bulloch, the new president of Georgia: “This morning is assigned … continue reading