The Declaration's Journey at the Museum of the American Revolution

What to Expect

The Declaration’s Journey at the Museum of the American Revolution explores the surprising and diverse meanings, adaptations and interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, highlighting its sometimes contradictory causes.

Encompassing more than 120 rare documents, works of art and artifacts from around the world, The Declaration’s Journey showcases how the document influenced over 100 other countries’ independence movements — and how we can reinterpret the Declaration some 250 years later.

A civil rights petition signed by 71 free Black Philadelphians, including Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, sent to Congress in 1799   — Photo courtesy National Archives & Records Administration

Exhibition attendees can compare and contrast America’s Declaration with nearly 20 others, including ones from Haiti, Chile, Poland, Korea and more.

Other artifacts include:

• a bronze cannon from the Caribbean used during the Haitian Revolution
• a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and notes made by Abraham Lincoln in preparation for his 1858 political debates
• the prison bench upon which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. composed “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
• Eleanor Roosevelt’s handwritten notes on a preamble draft for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• a spinning wheel presented by Mahatma Gandhi during India’s independence movement
• a first-edition printed copy of Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
• a manuscript draft of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen annotated by the Marquis de Lafayette
• the desk Elizabeth Cady Stanton used for writing History of Woman Suffrage, and
• a 1776 chair used by Thomas Jefferson when drafting the Declaration of Independence.

Charkha spinning wheel from Mahatma Gandhi   — Photo courtesy the Museum of the American Revolution

Finally, a central media theater experience — the museum’s most robust audio-visual offering to date — spotlights the global impact of the Declaration and how it led to rights movements worldwide.

The ambitious exhibition furthers the Old City museum’s mission to increase awareness of the many ordinary, diverse and little-known people who created our nation.

  — Photo by J.Fusco for Visit Philadelphia

For more information on The Declaration’s Journey, click the button below.